FICTION
The One About Bibi Netanyahu’s Father and the Perils of Diaspora
*
<https://www.facebook.com/dialog/feed?app_id=9869919170&link=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2021%2F06%2F18%2Fbooks%2Freview%2Fjoshua-cohen-the-netanyahus.html%3Fsmid%3Dfb-share&name=The%20One%20About%20Bibi%20Netanyahu%E2%80%99s%20Father%20and%20the%20Perils%20of%20Diaspora&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2F>
*
<https://api.whatsapp.com/send?text=The%20One%20About%20Bibi%20Netanyahu%E2%80%99s%20Father%20and%20the%20Perils%20of%20Diaspora%20https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2021%2F06%2F18%2Fbooks%2Freview%2Fjoshua-cohen-the-netanyahus.html%3Fsmid%3Dwa-share>
*
<https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2021%2F06%2F18%2Fbooks%2Freview%2Fjoshua-cohen-the-netanyahus.html%3Fsmid%3Dtw-share&text=The%20One%20About%20Bibi%20Netanyahu%E2%80%99s%20Father%20and%20the%20Perils%20of%20Diaspora>
*
<mailto:?subject=NYTimes.com%3A%20The%20One%20About%20Bibi%20Netanyahu%E2%80%99s%20Father%20and%20the%20Perils%20of%20Diaspora&body=From%20The%20New%20York%20Times%3A%0A%0AThe%20One%20About%20Bibi%20Netanyahu%E2%80%99s%20Father%20and%20the%20Perils%20of%20Diaspora%0A%0AIn%20his%20new%20novel%2C%20%E2%80%9CThe%20Netanyahus%2C%E2%80%9D%20Joshua%20Cohen%20imagines%20a%20visit%20by%20the%20scholar%20Benzion%20Netanyahu%20to%20an%20Ivy%20League%20school%20in%20the%20late%201950s.%0A%0Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2021%2F06%2F18%2Fbooks%2Freview%2Fjoshua-cohen-the-netanyahus.html%3Fsmid%3Dem-share>
*
*
In Joshua Cohen’s fictional rendering of Benzion Netanyahu, he is an
academic whose central insight is that hatred of the Jews is the Jewish
birthright.
In Joshua Cohen’s fictional rendering of Benzion Netanyahu, he is an
academic whose central insight is that hatred of the Jews is the Jewish
birthright.Credit...Pool photo by Kobi Gideon
BUY BOOK▾
When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we
earn an affiliate commission.
ByTaffy Brodesser-Akner <https://www.nytimes.com/by/taffy-brodesser-akner>
* NYT, June 18, 2021,11:38 a.m. ET
Joshua Cohen’s new novel, “The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and
Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous
Family,” is a generational campus novel, an unyielding academic lecture,
a rigorous meditation on Jewish identity, an exhaustive meditation on
Jewish-/American/identity, a polemic on Zionism, a history lesson. It is
an infuriating, frustrating, pretentious piece of work — and also
absorbing, delightful, hilarious, breathtaking and the best and most
relevant novel I’ve read in what feels like forever.
THE NETANYAHUS
An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the
History of a Very Famous Family
**By Joshua Cohen
248 pp. New York Review Books. Paper, $16.95.
“The Netanyahus” (as I’ll call it) is the highly fictionalized, highly
ostensible account of the very true time in the late 1950s when Benzion
Netanyahu, father of the longtime butvery recently deposed
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/13/world/middleeast/netanyahu-naftali-bennett-israel-vote.html?searchResultPosition=3>prime
minister Binyamin, arrived in the United States seeking an academic
position.
ADVERTISEMENT
Continue reading the main story
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/18/books/review/joshua-cohen-the-netanyahus.html?surface=most-popular&fellback=false&req_id=464214332&algo=bandit-all-surfaces-uh-nclicks-alpha-01&variant=1_bandit-all-surfaces-uh-nclicks-alpha-01&pool=pool/91fcf81c-4fb0-49ff-bd57-a24647c85ea1&imp_id=325478437&action=click&module=Popular%20in%20The%20Times&pgtype=Homepage#after-story-ad-1>
The narrator of the story is Ruben Blum, a taxation historian — “I/am/a
Jewish historian, but I am/not/a historian of the Jews,” he points out
on the second page — himself reiterating this story long after his
retirement from the fictional Corbindale College just as it has become a
place where a bewildering “culture of grievance” has taken over, one
that he finds “anathema.” Blum was a Brooklyn Jew, a cheder-educated yid
who had abandoned traditional Jewish life for academia — “I wasn’t what
I was doomed to be” — becoming the first Jew ever (not just hired
faculty, but first Jew on campus in any role, from student to janitor)
at Corbindale, which I am told via a press release for the book is a
stand-in for Cornell, where Netanyahu did spend some time teaching.
Image
Joshua Cohen
Joshua CohenCredit...Marion Ettlinger
Of course, when Blum left Brooklyn behind, he learned the same lesson
any Jew who attempts true assimilation in the diaspora learns: that in
trying to Just Be An American you are rendered even more Jewish. In your
attempts to not be seen as a Jew, you set off the Uncanny Valley
tripwires of the gentiles, and now all they see is your Jewishness,
which is its own kind of doom. That doom comes in a lot of forms: via
the sound of breaking glass of a Jewish storefront, via men dressed up
as Blockbuster Video employees, lit by torches, chanting that you won’t
replace them. Or it comes in a series of microaggressions: hence Blum
being asked to dress up as Santa Claus at the faculty Christmas parties
because “it’ll free up the people who actually celebrate the holiday to
enjoy themselves”; hence Blum getting his head patted by a garage
attendant who wants to know when he’s getting his horns serviced; hence
the local golf and racquet club constantly claiming to have lost the
Blums’ membership application. It is not a coincidence that at the exact
moment when the American-born Jew believes himself to have achieved the
heights of Good American status — as a frontier-crossing historian, say
— that is when he becomes the most conspicuously Jewish version of
himself yet.
But the story: Blum recounts being summoned to his boss’s office in the
late 1950s and told that the history department is considering a new
professor and would Blum please sit on the hiring committee? This
confuses Blum, as the candidate’s specialty is Iberian medieval history,
and Blum is an Americanist. It turns out that this candidate, Netanyahu,
is Jewish, and the department chair would like Blum’s take on
Netanyahu’s “fitness and aptitude” for the job and campus life, as a
fellow Jew.
Blum goes home to review Netanyahu’s scholarship and finds not the
normal research of a historian, but something stranger: What Netanyahu
purports about the Spanish Inquisition is just a variation on the same
kind of story young Blum heard at the knee of the rabbis who educated
him — namely that the Spanish Inquisition happened not because Catholics
wanted to convert Jews to Catholicism and expel all those who refused,
but because the Jews are doomed to suffer. In fact, Netanyahu asserts,
the Iberians tried to undo the Jewish conversions, not because the Jews
didn’t make good Catholics, but because “when they began to convert —
willingly, for the first time in their history — they were punished and
admonished that they could never be other than what they originally
were.” Reading these theories, Blum realizes that Netanyahu sees no
difference between 1490 and 1940, and that his central insight is that
hatred of the Jews is the Jewish birthright. This is not exactly an
academic line of thinking; “dogma” is the word Blum uses. Netanyahu, he
realizes, is a believer.
Editors’ Picks
The Espresso Martini Is Everywhere (Again)
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/17/style/espresso-martini-comeback.html?action=click&algo=identity&block=editors_picks_recirc&fellback=false&imp_id=451568288&impression_id=0a9753b0-d051-11eb-9573-9dcb0ed924ba&index=0&pgtype=Article&pool=editors-picks-ls®ion=ccolumn&req_id=732033716&surface=home-featured&variant=0_identity&action=click&module=editorContent&pgtype=Article®ion=CompanionColumn&contentCollection=Trending>
Resist the Temptation to Tell All on Your Way Out
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/18/business/roxane-gay-work-friend.html?action=click&algo=identity&block=editors_picks_recirc&fellback=false&imp_id=318833139&impression_id=0a9753b1-d051-11eb-9573-9dcb0ed924ba&index=1&pgtype=Article&pool=editors-picks-ls®ion=ccolumn&req_id=732033716&surface=home-featured&variant=0_identity&action=click&module=editorContent&pgtype=Article®ion=CompanionColumn&contentCollection=Trending>
How She Transformed a Viral Twitter Thread About Sex Work Into a
Sinister Comedy
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/16/magazine/how-she-transformed-a-viral-twitter-thread-about-sex-work-into-a-sinister-comedy.html?action=click&algo=identity&block=editors_picks_recirc&fellback=false&imp_id=442499488&impression_id=0a9753b2-d051-11eb-9573-9dcb0ed924ba&index=2&pgtype=Article&pool=editors-picks-ls®ion=ccolumn&req_id=732033716&surface=home-featured&variant=0_identity&action=click&module=editorContent&pgtype=Article®ion=CompanionColumn&contentCollection=Trending>
Continue reading the main story
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/18/books/review/joshua-cohen-the-netanyahus.html?surface=most-popular&fellback=false&req_id=464214332&algo=bandit-all-surfaces-uh-nclicks-alpha-01&variant=1_bandit-all-surfaces-uh-nclicks-alpha-01&pool=pool/91fcf81c-4fb0-49ff-bd57-a24647c85ea1&imp_id=325478437&action=click&module=Popular%20in%20The%20Times&pgtype=Homepage&action=click&module=editorContent&pgtype=Article®ion=CompanionColumn&contentCollection=Trending#after-pp_edpick>
Image
ADVERTISEMENT
Continue reading the main story
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/18/books/review/joshua-cohen-the-netanyahus.html?surface=most-popular&fellback=false&req_id=464214332&algo=bandit-all-surfaces-uh-nclicks-alpha-01&variant=1_bandit-all-surfaces-uh-nclicks-alpha-01&pool=pool/91fcf81c-4fb0-49ff-bd57-a24647c85ea1&imp_id=325478437&action=click&module=Popular%20in%20The%20Times&pgtype=Homepage#after-story-ad-2>
Blum cannot turn away from Netanyahu’s work. Like the rest of us running
from our upbringings and therefore obsessed by them, he can’t stop
reflecting upon his own past. The sleepless hours he spends reading
through Netanyahu’s writing were “the first time in my life I’d ever
looked back and compared who I’d been with who I’d become. I was a
tenure track historian and an active participant in secular American
life sneaking around in the attic-mind of an obscure Israeli academic
like I was one of the antique Jews he wrote about, a convert forcibly
returned to the faith I’d left and too consumed by internal turmoil to
notice the hour until — jolted by the chatter of amatory birds‚ I’d turn
and tug aside the curtain and outside the window was morning.”
Through this all is the story of Blum’s home life, which contains his
wife, Edith, who misses New York, and their daughter, Judy, who, like
all daughters, is slightly more liberal than they are. She’s writing her
college essays now — the theme is fairness — and pining for a nose job,
which she will get at all costs. On a Thanksgiving visit, Edith’s mother
puts Blum’s impossible position succinctly: “If you decide to go and
hire this Jew, they’ll say Jewish favoritism. If you decide not to go
and hire this Jew, they’ll say you’re trying to avoid the appearance of
Jewish favoritism.”
Blum, of course, is asked to host Netanyahu through the rigmarole of a
hiring weekend: a job interview, a guest lecture, drinks at the local.
Netanyahu brings along his three sons and his wife, Tzila, and Edith
shows the Netanyahus her American hospitality. To say it gets chaotic
from there is an understatement, but more, the chaos is just the
ingenious layer on top of what this book also is, which is a brilliant
examination of the Jew’s role in American society, always a tense place.
The success of the Jews in America doesn’t dispel danger; no, the
success creates the danger.
This is what the book is about, about the grappling of American Jewry
(and its secret girlfriend, Israel). “The Netanyahus” presents, in
addition to a dynamic and compelling story, a thorough history of the
quarrels of Zionism at its founding and an account of the unimaginable
thing that happened when finally the Jews had a national homeland and a
place to go, when, according to the Netanyahu in this book, Jews stopped
being a mythological people who wandered the earth, who were chased
around the earth, and began being a people who could their record their
own history. They — we — were finally real.
This seems heavy, yes. And it is! But I promise that the book is both
readable and, in spots, I absolutely screamed with laughter. I hesitate
to say it’s accessible, only because of the amount of unnecessarily
blue-chip words that appear throughout. And here I’ll take a paragraph
on just this. It was unclear to me if these words appeared as a way to
convey the character of Ruben Blum — maybe as a pompous professorial
type? If so, it was lost on me, since the net result was the same: I
lost some of the rhythm in a Sheol of internet vocabulary searches,
though, to be clear, I do not cavil at these words, lest my own lesser
vocabulary stick out like a carbuncle. (Also: Glabrous! Cathexes!
Strappado! It goes on!)
“The Netanyahus,” as an appendix to the book reads, was inspired by a
story that the literary critic and academic Harold Bloom told Cohen
toward the end of Bloom’s life. Blum, however, appears to be a wholly
fictional character, even though the real-life Benzion Netanyahu did
spend some time at Cornell as a professor. It’s unclear what else about
the book is true.
But I also don’t care. Because this was a great book for me to read
during the weeks after it was assigned to me, as tensions between Israel
and Gaza raged and there was nothing to say about the matter but to text
a few people I’m in touch with when these things go on and share my
distress and also my inability to share that distress wider. This was a
good book to read while tensions escalated further, and friends reached
out to me who were just “wondering” what my point of view was on it, in
argument stance, and people I didn’t know tweeted at me to see where my
support for an oppressed people was, and my peers — who know full well
the constraints of my job’s policy on tweeting about politics
—/liked/those tweets, as though being Jewish meant I had to answer for
Israel or its government, which I did not elect.
ADVERTISEMENT
Continue reading the main story
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/18/books/review/joshua-cohen-the-netanyahus.html?surface=most-popular&fellback=false&req_id=464214332&algo=bandit-all-surfaces-uh-nclicks-alpha-01&variant=1_bandit-all-surfaces-uh-nclicks-alpha-01&pool=pool/91fcf81c-4fb0-49ff-bd57-a24647c85ea1&imp_id=325478437&action=click&module=Popular%20in%20The%20Times&pgtype=Homepage#after-story-ad-3>
This was a good book to read as I searched in my mind for other times
that we cheer on terrorism except for when it’s happening to the Jews.
This was a good book to read as the meme of asserting that the
“questioning” of Israel’s policies is not anti-Semitism morphed into
something that was, by some parties, actually yes quite gleeful and
strenuous anti-Semitism, until finally my sisters in Crown Heights began
to beseech their male children to cover their yarmulkes with baseball
caps and the world around me was heartbreakingly silent as Jews were
cornered and threatened here in America for something going on very far
away. This was a good book to read as my Jewish friends texted me that
this would stop if we could just get Bibi out of power, and I wondered
what they texted each other in 1935 as the streets in Europe overheated
with pogrom energy and there was no Bibi and no Israel to blame.
Yes, this book was a good place to turn to swallow my opinions, which
are fungible and not really worth knowing, while smart people I know
shared the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict as cherry-picked by an
Instagram influencer or by a tweet thread that had similarly squishy
origins. It was good to actually know the history of the Jews and the
founding of Israel, and learn about the infighting of it even more
intimately from this book, as the noise around me got louder and I began
to sympathize with Benzion’s point of view not of everything, but of the
fact that it must be that Jews were doomed to this particular torture:
to remain polite and quiet as this goes on. I began to have Benzion
Netanyahu’s old dogmatic thought that this kind of hatred had to be
preordained by someone. A thing they didn’t prepare me for in my own
cheder — or maybe they did and I just didn’t hear it — was that the
unique sadness and terror of anti-Semitism for the Jews lies not just in
its violence, but in the people around you pretending that the violence
doesn’t even exist.
It was good to be able to hold all the dimensions of all the ways a Jew
can be in this country and in the diaspora in my hands — literally in my
hands in the form of a book called “The Netanyahus,” where Jews could
have that conversation among ourselves, since who is going to read a
book called “The Netanyahus”? It felt like a deeply personal experience
I was having, a shelter, so much so that I asked my editor on this
review and my older sister and a writer friend to read it along with me.
It was with these people that I talked about this book, about the
complications of Zionism, the necessary criticisms of Israel, the
horrible loneliness of being an American Jew in ways we can’t always
talk about when someone else is listening.
I finished writing this as the rhetoric against Israel that had parlayed
itself into violent attacks on Jews in the streets of America quieted
down, and the online conversation on anti-Semitism chastened itself and
receded into its safest places, a place we all agree upon, where a
gentile author was bullied into removing an innocuousAnne Frank
reference
<https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jun/08/elin-hilderbrand-asks-for-anne-frank-reference-to-be-cut-from-novel-after-complaints>and
we Jews all broke our necks nodding in defense of an author being able
to make an innocuous Anne Frank reference — and there we American Jews
were again, going out of our way to promise we won’t be any trouble if
you just leave us alone. Yes, make jokes about that poor dead girl, just
please don’t kill us!
Things cooled, as they do, and I was faced with a new book to review,
but I didn’t. Instead, I reread this one, in the name of shaking off the
noise of the previous weeks and spending a little more time among
friends, too consumed by internal turmoil to notice the hour until —
jolted by the chatter of amatory birds — I’d turn and tug aside the
curtain and outside the window it was morning.
Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a staff writer for The Times Magazine, a
contributor to the culture desk and the author of “Fleishman Is in Trouble.”
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group.
View/Reply Online (#9290): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/9290
Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/83632185/21656
-=-=-
POSTING RULES & NOTES
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
#4 Do not exceed five posts a day.
-=-=-
Group Owner: [email protected]
Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/21656/1316126222/xyzzy
[[email protected]]
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
