College Commons

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Joshua Cohen reimagines a meeting between two giants of 20th century Judaism as debate about the Jewish destiny. 2021 National Jewish Book Award and 2022 Pulitzer Prize Winner, The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ulti­mate­ly Even Neg­li­gi­ble Episode in the His­to­ry of a Very Famous Family Corbin College, not quite upstate New York, winter 1959–1960: Ruben Blum, a Jewish historian—but not an historian of the Jews—is co-opted onto a hiring committee to review the application of an exiled Israeli scholar specializing in the Spanish Inquisition. When Benzion Netanyahu shows up for an interview, family unexpectedly in tow, Blum plays the reluctant host to guests who proceed to lay waste to his American complacencies. Mixing fiction with nonfiction, the campus novel with the lecture, The Netanyahus is a wildly inventive, genre-bending comedy of blending, identity, and politics that finds Joshua Cohen at the height of his powers. Joshua Cohen was born in 1980 in Atlantic Ci