American author Joshua Cohen is seen at the Coop Ambasciatori bookshop in Bologna, Italy, September 5, 2019. (Roberto Serra–Iguana Press\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
The prize committee called the novel \u201ca mordant, linguistically deft historical novel about the ambiguities of the Jewish-American experience, presenting ideas and disputes as volatile as its tightly-wound plot.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cohen, 41, based the novel on a real-life visit by Benzion Netanyahu, a historian and the father of Benjamin Netanyahu, to Cornell University, where the elder Netanyahu served as a professor of Judaic studies from 1971\u20131975. Cohen said the story of the Netanyahus\u2019 initial visit to the campus was related to him by the late literary critic Harold Bloom.<\/p>\n
In the novel, the assimilated Jewish narrator hosts the family and bristles at Benzion\u2019s fiercely nationalist worldview. \u201cI wanted to write something about the identity politics and the campus politics that are around us,\u201d Cohen told Hey Alma, JTA\u2019s sister site. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot in Benzion Netanyahu that\u2019s really about the tribalism that happens when these large ethnic or racial collectives collapse \u2014 these empires collapse, and they collapse into tribalism.\u201d<\/p>\n
Reviews were largely positive for the novel; The Guardian called it \u201ca comic historical fantasia \u2014 a dizzying range of bookish learning and worldly knowhow is given rich, resourceful expression.\u201d The novel won the Jewish Book Council\u2019s fiction award for 2021.<\/p>\n
But there were detractors. Jewish Currents criticized the novel for being derivative of both Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, and the Jewish Review of Books said that the novel includes \u201ca capsule history of Zionism that is so blatant a distortion that I just gave up.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Netanyahus\u201d is Cohen\u2019s sixth novel.<\/p>\n
One of the finalists for the fiction prize was \u201cMonkey Boy,\u201d by Francisco Goldman, based in part on Goldman\u2019s own background as the son of a Jewish father and a Guatemalan Catholic mother.<\/p>\n
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