The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family

Joshua Cohen’s novel, The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family (2021), is based on a story the author heard from the preeminent literary scholar Harold Bloom, in which he recounts meeting Ben-Zion Netanyahu. Cohen took that idea and created a fictionalized tale. The novel parodies the traditional campus/academic novel, a genre in which the setting is a university campus and the main characters are academes. The novel also uses other genres within the campus one, namely historical fiction, the epistolary novel, and meta-fiction. Through these differing styles, Cohen addresses several difficult topics: Zionism, the ontology of Jewishness, and the idea of American exceptionalism. The Netanyahus won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2022. For reference purposes, this study guide uses the 2021 Fitzcarraldo Editions version of the novel.

Plot Summary

The first-person narrator Ruben Blum is a history professor at Corbin University in Corbindale, New York. When he was first hired, he became the first Jewish professor, even the first Jewish person, at Corbin University.

Ruben is entirely secular, as are his wife Edith (also Jewish) and daughter Judy. They are just like any other American family, except that Ruben’s orthodox parents and Jewish upbringing weigh on his mind and self-consciousness. He struggles with his Jewish identity and feels isolated from the community. Judy struggles predominantly with the shape of her nose, which she wants altered through cosmetic surgery. Edith is a bored housewife. When Dr. Morse asks Ruben to sit on the committee to hire a new professor, he makes it appear as a duty all faculty must endure at some point, but the main reason is the first person to be interviewed is another Jewish person, Ben-Zion Netanyahu. Ruben proceeds to narrate the events leading up to and involving his meeting with Ben-Zion, Ben-Zion's wife, and three sons.

While Ruben and Edith struggle with decisions regarding the holidays—Jewish, American, and Christian (Rosh Hashanah, Thanksgiving, and Christmas)—and struggle with Judy’s desire for a new nose and her university applications, Ruben receives two letters of recommendation. The first is from Rabbi Dr. Chaim “Hank” Edelman from Dropsie College for Hebrew and Cognate Learning in Philadelphia His letter touts the intelligence and merits of Ben-Zion. The second letter is from Dr. Prof. Peretz Levavi (Peter Lügner) from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel. In the unflattering letter, Levavi warns Ruben about Ben-Zion’s Revisionist Zionism and his confrontational and egotistical personality.

Edith’s parents, Sabine and Walt, visit from New York City for Rosh Hashanah. Sabine is critical of Ruben and Corbindale. She has brought new clothes from the city for Judy, but the clothes are ruined when Sabine opens the suitcase and discovers a tube of special nose ointment has exploded inside. Judy is furious that her mother told her grandmother about her wanting to alter her nose. Walt and Ruben agree that there is nothing wrong with Judy’s nose. Judy storms off to her room.

Ruben’s parents, Alter and Henya, come for Thanksgiving. During dinner, Alter asks Judy personal questions that lead to an argument. The next morning, Judy is not up and ready. When Alter knocks on her door, Judy says the door is stuck, so Alter rams the door with his shoulder. The doorknob smashes Judy’s nose. She is rushed to the hospital. Ruben believes Judy planned the injury so she could finally have plastic surgery.

In January, Ben-Zion arrives at the Blums’ house with his wife and three boys driving a battered station wagon. Ben-Zion hadn’t planned on bringing the entire family, but their babysitter cancelled. The Netanyahus make themselves at home. The boys are wild and unruly. Ben-Zion and his wife Tzila bicker in a mixture of Hebrew and English. Edith works hard to keep the house clean and serve refreshments. Eventually, Ruben and Ben-Zion leave for campus. Tzila and the boys stay with Edith until they can check into their hotel room.

On campus, Ruben and Ben-Zion meet Dr. Huggles outside the seminary. Ben-Zion has thus far been critical of the university and members of the faculty. He is upset about having to teach a Bible lesson simply because he speaks Hebrew and is a Jewish person from Israel. He tests Dr. Huggles’s biblical knowledge by speaking to him in Yiddish, claiming it is the original Hebrew verse from Exodus. Dr. Huggles fails the test. When Ben-Zion gives his Bible lesson, he focuses on the Bible’s veracity via an unbroken line of descent. Jewish history is no different, and its interpretation, historical veracity, depends on those who wrote history. Hence, why the Jewish people believe so much in the Talmud, the rabbinical interpretation of Jewish scripture. Interpretation was the only Jewish freedom they had under so many years of oppression. The interview with the hiring committee follows directly after the Bible lesson.

During the interview, Ben-Zion is questioned about his research. His thesis is that the Jewish people were seen as a religious group prior to the Inquisition, but during and thereafter the definition of a Jewish person became racial. Dr. Hillard questions how the research is received by the Jewish community at large, which neither Ben-Zion nor Ruben can answer on the grounds that they can no better speak for Jewish people than any of the others could speak for every American. Lastly, Ben-Zion’s political views are questioned, and in a circuitous manner Ben-Zion answers he is for democracy and capitalism. He is not a socialist or Marxist.

Following the interview, everyone has dinner at the local hotel. The hotel is overbooked, and when Tzila went to get a second room for her and the children but couldn’t, she cancelled the original room, telling Edith that the whole family will stay with them. When Ruben finds Edith, she is stressed, angry, and drinking. Furthermore, Tzila had the idea that Judy would watch the boys while she and Edith attended Ben-Zion’s lecture that evening.

Ben-Zion begins his lecture, which quickly moves away from history and enters the political realm: the justification and need for the Jewish homeland (Israel) because of the need to write their own history, the weakness of American exceptionalism, and the belief in America’s ability for assimilation, which he concludes that “if the American empire couldn’t persuade allegiance to democracy over origin, it would fail” (215).

When they arrive back at the Blums’ house, Ruben discovers their new color TV smashed. Iddo, the youngest Netanyahu boy, is asleep among the detritus of a gingerbread house. The middle child Benjamin is keeping watch on the stairs. When he sees Ruben, he yells for his older brother Jonathon and bounds past Ruben out the door. Jonathan runs after him, naked. Edith is yelling, and Judy emerges from her bedroom, also naked, yelling back. Edith attacks Tzila, who laughs, calling them Puritans. Ruben, Ben-Zion, and Tzila leave to find the boys. Ruben and Ben-Zion find the boys huddled behind a house, cold and shivering. The sheriff drives Ruben home. Ruben tells the Sheriff the Netanyahus are Turks.

The novel ends with details of the Netanyahu boys’ adult lives. He then explains how he met Harold Bloom, from whom he got the idea of the story. Toward the end of his life, Bloom had told Cohen about how he had met Ben-Zion Netanyahu. Bloom’s wife, Jeanne, corroborated the story. Joshua Cohen then ends by explaining the fictional invention of Judy, because the Blooms never had a daughter, though they did care for a young, female relative for a time. The novel ends with a scathing email from this relative denouncing the book.