Join us for an evening with Joshua Cohen discussing his novel The Netanyahus: An Account of a minor and ultimately even negligible episode in the history of a very famous family! This is a virtual event please register in advance here
A job interview goes awry for the exiled patriarch of Israel’s First Family in this riotous novel from one of contemporary fiction’s most brilliant and audacious writers.
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 non-fiction, the campus novel with the lecture, The Netanyahus is a wildly inventive, genre-bending comedy of blending, identity, and politics—“An Account of A Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family” that finds Joshua Cohen at the height of his powers.
About the Author:
Joshua Aaron Cohen is an American novelist and story writer, best known for his works Witz, Book of Numbers, and Moving Kings.
About the Moderator:
Rebecca Panovka is co-editor of The Drift, a magazine of culture and politics that launched in 2020.