The Netanyahus
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.
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This novel takes place in a small liberal arts college in upstate New York in 1959. The narrator, Daniel Blum, is an economics professor trying to get tenure. He specializes in tax history and is the only Jewish member of the faculty. When the university is considering hiring Benzion Netanyahu, father of future Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, they ask Ruben to sit on the hiring committee. From the start, the campus visit does not go as planned.
Wish I could give this 4 1/2 stars... Full review on the site.
This novel takes place in a small liberal arts college in upstate New York in 1959. The narrator, Daniel Blum, is an economics professor trying to get tenure. He specializes in tax history and is the only Jewish member of the faculty. When the university is considering hiring Benzion Netanyahu, father of future Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, they ask Ruben to sit on the hiring committee. From the start, the campus visit does not go as planned.
Wish I could give this 4 1/2 stars... Full review on the site.
Listen to this book. You will go back in time and learn so much while laughing out loud. Though it is fiction there is a lot of truth. Highly recommend.
I wanted to like this book and enjoyed the first quarter or so, narrated by Ruben (Rube) Blum, where he relates the changes he has seen over a long career in academia, particularly the changes in students who have become intolerably sensitive and require coddling. But this is all just a slow build-up to the purpose of the story--taking a sledgehammer to the reputation of the real Netanyahu family. To achieve this, Blum recalls the train-wreck visit of Ben Zion Netanyahu, desperate to win a teaching position at Corbin College, where Blum, the only current Jewish faculty member, has been corralled into researching Netanyahu's academic background and chaperoning him through his visit. Blum resents this task, knowing he is only being asked because he is Jewish, as he and the visiting professor have nothing in common academically. Blum himself is totally apathetic Jewishly.
In an end note, the author concedes that the book's premise was based on an anecdote told to him by the late Harold Bloom, about the historian Ben Zion Netanyahu, who indeed tried out for such a position at a college where Harold Bloom had taught, and apparently, it was a fiasco. This was thin gruel out of which to write a quasi-novel, based on real people and the memories of one now deceased witness. While Cohen can be very, very funny, when the point of a book is a mean-spirited attack on an entire family the humor begins to fail. In that same end note, Cohen also slams Bibi Netanyahu, the middle son of Ben Zion and former Israeli prime minister, even implicating him in the murder of Itzhak Rabin at that hands of extremist Yigal Amir. Cohen claims that Bibi didn't condemn extremists who attended his own political rallies with Rabin in effigy, insinuating that this may have led to Rabin's murder. I do not know whether this is true or not, but it is despicable for Cohen to identify Amir as "Orthodox" and driven by supposedly religious impulses without also noting that his evil act was condemed as evil such by Jews worldwide, including by the Orthodox community. He also slams many of Netanyahu's acts as PM that helped reduce the rate of terrorism in Israel, failing to note such terrorism even existed.
And the novel itself is a failure on many levels. Themes that promise some exploration are dropped instantly. For example, the thoroughly secular Blum is drawn back into his painful memories of a religious upbringing by having to wade through Netanyahu's writings on the history of Jews in the Middle Ages. Will this lead to a new understanding of Blum's Jewish identity? No. It's a premise that is drop-shipped into the story but then is dropped, period. The Netanyahus themselves are so thoroughly obnoxious (Ben Zion, his wife, and their 3 sons) that any potential renewed interest Blum might have had in Jewish history or peoplehood would have been quashed.
Additionally, Cohen inserts lengthy scenes, one with his parents (immigrant Jews who are not formally eduated) and one with his in-laws (secular, wealthy, and snobbish), seemingly to showcase various flavors of unappealing Jews. The parents are not part of the storyline on any ongoing basis. Blum's daughter, Judy, is a cynical high-school senior who is unhappy about her nose--another way in which Jewishness is negative in this story. But, so what? None of these characters or the scenes they are in add up to anything other than more evidence that so many manifestations of Jewishness, whether the smug, secular mother-in-law; the street savvy but crude father; the disaffected teenaged daughter, or the horrible Netanyahus themselves, are huge turn-offs.
Cohen loves pretentious words, too, such as chthonic, verdigrised, coruscant, sudorous, sebacious, etc, but they do nothing to lift this disjointed story into something coherent. All it adds up to is an excuse for Cohen to exercise his anti-religious and anti-Israel bias. Talk about a turnoff.
In an end note, the author concedes that the book's premise was based on an anecdote told to him by the late Harold Bloom, about the historian Ben Zion Netanyahu, who indeed tried out for such a position at a college where Harold Bloom had taught, and apparently, it was a fiasco. This was thin gruel out of which to write a quasi-novel, based on real people and the memories of one now deceased witness. While Cohen can be very, very funny, when the point of a book is a mean-spirited attack on an entire family the humor begins to fail. In that same end note, Cohen also slams Bibi Netanyahu, the middle son of Ben Zion and former Israeli prime minister, even implicating him in the murder of Itzhak Rabin at that hands of extremist Yigal Amir. Cohen claims that Bibi didn't condemn extremists who attended his own political rallies with Rabin in effigy, insinuating that this may have led to Rabin's murder. I do not know whether this is true or not, but it is despicable for Cohen to identify Amir as "Orthodox" and driven by supposedly religious impulses without also noting that his evil act was condemed as evil such by Jews worldwide, including by the Orthodox community. He also slams many of Netanyahu's acts as PM that helped reduce the rate of terrorism in Israel, failing to note such terrorism even existed.
And the novel itself is a failure on many levels. Themes that promise some exploration are dropped instantly. For example, the thoroughly secular Blum is drawn back into his painful memories of a religious upbringing by having to wade through Netanyahu's writings on the history of Jews in the Middle Ages. Will this lead to a new understanding of Blum's Jewish identity? No. It's a premise that is drop-shipped into the story but then is dropped, period. The Netanyahus themselves are so thoroughly obnoxious (Ben Zion, his wife, and their 3 sons) that any potential renewed interest Blum might have had in Jewish history or peoplehood would have been quashed.
Additionally, Cohen inserts lengthy scenes, one with his parents (immigrant Jews who are not formally eduated) and one with his in-laws (secular, wealthy, and snobbish), seemingly to showcase various flavors of unappealing Jews. The parents are not part of the storyline on any ongoing basis. Blum's daughter, Judy, is a cynical high-school senior who is unhappy about her nose--another way in which Jewishness is negative in this story. But, so what? None of these characters or the scenes they are in add up to anything other than more evidence that so many manifestations of Jewishness, whether the smug, secular mother-in-law; the street savvy but crude father; the disaffected teenaged daughter, or the horrible Netanyahus themselves, are huge turn-offs.
Cohen loves pretentious words, too, such as chthonic, verdigrised, coruscant, sudorous, sebacious, etc, but they do nothing to lift this disjointed story into something coherent. All it adds up to is an excuse for Cohen to exercise his anti-religious and anti-Israel bias. Talk about a turnoff.
Perhaps one of the oddest things I've read in a long time. Starts out as a college prof read alike for Death of a Salesman. Then devolves into some kind of slapstick jab at Jewish memes, ending with something like a Keystone Cops finale. This would be a great play for a certain audience. Not the book for me.
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