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Joshua Cohen: The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family

Joshua Cohen: The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family

(Fiction, 240 pp. 2021)

Reinventing the Netanyahus’ late-1950s Americana period as a college campus satire, Cohen fictionalizes a relationship between Bibi’s father, the then-obscure Israeli historian Ben-Zion Netanyahu, and his foil, narrator Professor Ruben Blum, a Bronx-born tax historian who stands-in for Diaspora Jewry.  Alternatively hilarious and laboriously rendered, The Netanyahus acts as a gateway to exploring Jewish identity, the meaning of assimilation, and the myth of place in Jewish imagination.

Review from Kirkus Reviews

Article after Joshua Cohen’s Pulitzer win by Jessica Steinberg, The Times of Israel, May 18, 2022

Interview with Joshua Cohen upon winning the Pulitzer Prize, Haaretz, May 16, 2022

Review by Bob Goldfarb, Jewish Book Council, June 21, 2021

Review by Emily Burack, The Times of Israel, June 25, 2021

Review by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, New York Times, November 2, 2021

Review by Nathan Goldman, JewishCurrents, September 29, 2021

Review by John Powers, NPR, June 30, 2021

Review by David N. Myers, Los Angeles Review of Books, July 30, 2021

Review by Leo Robson, The Guardian, May 20, 2021

Podcast with Colm Toibin, London Review Bookshop Podcast (audio)

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