Joshua Cohen’s satirical novel ‘The Netanyahus’ wins Pulitzer Prize for fiction
Cohen’s book satirizes a real-life visit to America by the future prime minister’s father.
American author Joshua Cohen is seen at the Coop Ambasciatori bookshop in Bologna, Italy, September 5, 2019. (Roberto Serra–Iguana Press/Getty Images)
By Andrew Silow-Carroll May 9, 2022
(JTA) — The 2022 Pulitzer Prize in fiction went to “The Netanyahus,” a scathing, satirical novel by Brooklyn writer Joshua Cohen that imagines a visit by the family of the former Israeli prime minister to an American college town in the early 1960s.
The prize committee called the novel “a mordant, linguistically deft historical novel about the ambiguities of the Jewish-American experience, presenting ideas and disputes as volatile as its tightly-wound plot.”
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 1971–1975. Cohen said the story of the Netanyahus’ initial visit to the campus was related to him by the late literary critic Harold Bloom.
In the novel, the assimilated Jewish narrator hosts the family and bristles at Benzion’s fiercely nationalist worldview. “I wanted to write something about the identity politics and the campus politics that are around us,” Cohen told Hey Alma, JTA’s sister site. “There’s a lot in Benzion Netanyahu that’s really about the tribalism that happens when these large ethnic or racial collectives collapse — these empires collapse, and they collapse into tribalism.”
Reviews were largely positive for the novel; The Guardian called it “a comic historical fantasia — a dizzying range of bookish learning and worldly knowhow is given rich, resourceful expression.” The novel won the Jewish Book Council’s fiction award for 2021.
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 “a capsule history of Zionism that is so blatant a distortion that I just gave up.”
“The Netanyahus” is Cohen’s sixth novel.
One of the finalists for the fiction prize was “Monkey Boy,” by Francisco Goldman, based in part on Goldman’s own background as the son of a Jewish father and a Guatemalan Catholic mother.
This story originally appeared on JTA.org.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
