Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus is a sharp, comic, intellectually layered novel loosely based on a real anecdote from the late American literary critic Harold Bloom. As a blend of satire, history, and cultural critique, Cohen used these different modes to explore the friction between Jewish identity, the academic world, and family disorder through a made-up story of the Netanyahu family (yes, the family of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu) visiting a small college in America during the late 1950s.
The story is narrated by Ruben Blum, a tired Jewish historian who teaches early American history at the fictional Corbin College in upstate New York. Blum is the only Jewish member of the faculty in a predominantly Christian, academic world of the province, and his colleagues constantly expect him to be the living encyclopedia of anything that has the remotest connection with the Jews. While the college is mulling over hiring Benzion Netanyahu—a passionate, fiery, and revisionist historian of medieval Spanish Jewry—the administration wants Blum, the odd man out, to play the host and the evaluator. That is despite the fact that Blum's field is unrelated to that of Netanyahu.
Ruben goes along with it against his better judgment and only to realize that Benzion not only comes but brings along his entire riotous family with him, that is, his wife Tzila, and three sons—Jonathan, Benjamin, and Iddo. What proceeds is a series of progressively worsening domestic and academic fiascos as the Blums are invaded by the Netanyahus. The visit spirals down into a disaster of cultures, characters, and historical misunderstandings. Benzion, full of energy and without backing down one bit, fiercely attacks both academic and American norms through his lectures and debates, and thus forces the latter to wake up from their dream of Jewish history as simply one more of many sufferings baled together with resistance and ultimately assured final deliverance of the Jews by their own nation.
As the story progresses, Cohen employs this ludicrous visit to bring out the underlying motifs. Ruben wrestles with his own dilapidated position in the American academic world—he is there more for show, not completely accepted, tokenized yet sidelined. While on the other hand, Benzion represents a militant, Zionist perspective that comes from the European Jewish tragedies. Their debates unravel the different lived experiences, fears, and possible futures of Jews from Europe, Israel, and America. Kids, esp. little Benjamin, are the source of both laughs and prophetic irony, giving cues to the political Benjamin will be in the future.
The novel achieves its comedic peak with a catastrophic campus visit that is concluded with destroying property and leaving people baffled and is thus an indictment of the intellectual character of the pompousness of the satirical figures in the novel and the ridiculousness of the institutions in which they operate. However, beneath the jest, there is a substantial investigation into what it means to be Jewish, the heaviness of historical trauma, and the Jews’ uneasy role in postwar America. Ruben’s musings let us in on how tough it was for him to balance personal ambition, cultural legacy, and the quiet compromises he had to make in order to survive in a system that still saw him as an outsider.
In the end, the visit leaves the Blums exhausted and puzzled and the college still undecided about Benzion’s appointment. Ruben writes off the incident as both insignificant and symbolic: minor in terms of its immediate effects but revealing of a larger historical and cultural tension. Cohen ends with a rather sardonic and thoughtful tone, suggesting that his novel is not merely a comic fiasco but also a comment on how our private encounters can mirror—and distort—big historical narratives.
