A Shared Language Lost Joshua Leifer (bio) The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family by Joshua Cohen New York Review Books, 2021, 248 pp. Since Israel’s founding, what was once the Jewish people has undergone a great disaggregation. In the United States, non-Orthodox Judaism is post-ethnic, postmodern, post-God; in Israel, “Jewish” is a nationality, printed on state ID cards. In the United States, marriage between Jews and non-Jews is not just common but the norm: according to a 2021 Pew Study, 72 percent of non-Orthodox Jews who married between 2010 and 2020 reported having a non-Jewish spouse. In the words of Israel’s newly elected president Isaac “Buji” Herzog, this feature of American Jewish life amounts to nothing less than a “plague.” In the United States, the Reform movement is the largest denomination; in Israel “reformi” is somewhere between a joke and a slur. More than half of American Jews believe that “working for justice and equality” is “essential” to their Jewish identity; meanwhile, a 2016 Pew Study found that 79 percent of Israeli Jews believe Jews should receive preferential treatment in Israel, and that more Israeli Jews agree that “Arabs should be expelled or transferred from Israel” than disagree. This seemingly irrevocable fissure in Jewish collectivity is at the heart of Joshua Cohen’s latest novel, The Netanyahus. The novel is a fictionalization of a real event—when the literary critic Harold Bloom was asked to manage the visit of former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s father, Benzion Netanyahu, for a job interview at Cornell—and unfolds on the snowy New York campus of Corbin College. Cohen’s Netanyahus are hosted by the American economic historian Ruben Blum, whose research deals, in a veiled gesture toward Bloom, with debts, but of the material rather than literary kind: the history of taxation. Less formally inventive and lexically adventurous than Cohen’s earlier novels, The Netanyahus traverses debates not only about Jewish history and memory but also about the contemporary campus culture wars. It is neither as funny or cutting as Moving Kings (2017) nor as ambitious as Book of Numbers (2015). Still, The Netanyahus is an amusing and often insightful re-envisioning of a moment in Jewish history when, as Cohen writes, “nearly all the world’s Jews were involved... in becoming something else”—in Israel, “reinventing themselves into a single people, united by the hatreds of contrary regimes,” and in the United States, “being deinvented, or uninvented, or assimilated, by democracy and market-forces, intermarriage and miscegenation.” It was also a time, early enough in the development of these parallel processes, when American and Israeli Jews still retained enough [End Page 127] of a shared language to really talk with one another. The book’s drama is set in motion by what today we might call a microaggression. Blum is summoned by his department chair, the affable WASP Dr. Morse, to accept a task for which he is technically unqualified. Corbin College is vetting a candidate for a joint appointment in history and the Bible: Benzion Netanyahu, who, as he was in real life, is an ardently right-wing Zionist polemicist, a long-frustrated scholar of the Spanish Inquisition and Sephardic Jewry, and the author of a 1,000-plus-page opus on the subject. Blum is an Americanist with little knowledge of European history, yet Morse places him on the hiring committee because Blum, like Netanyahu, is a Jew, and the only one on Corbin’s faculty. He is tasked with assessing not Netanyahu’s scholarship but what Morse calls “His Character. His fitness and aptitude... Whether he’d integrate well into the Corbin community.” In practice, this means allowing Netanyahu and his family to stay in Blum’s house and chaperoning him around campus. While such genteel anti-Semitism is hard to imagine in universities today, it resembles experiences that academics of color, especially Black academics, have more recently described. The parallel to contemporary campus politics is intentional. When the novel opens, Blum is with us in the twenty-first century, looking back on past events. He...