Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on May 12, 2022

This was the best work of Jewish fiction that I read this past year.

I am not alone in my love. Joshua Cohen has just won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his novel, The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family. It had already won a National Jewish Book Award.

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.

Why did I love this book? Because it is a novel about ideas - Jewish theology, Jewish views of history, and at least one version of the Zionist idea.

The Netanyahus is a fictional account of a visit that Benzion Netanyahu made to fictional Corbin College in upstate New York in 1960. The distinguished historian of the Spanish Inquisition was interviewing for a teaching position at the college. (The real Professor Netanyahu died in 2012 at the age of 102).

The entire family comes along for the trip: Ben-Zions wife, Tzila; the future Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin, or Bibi; Yonatan (or Yoni), who led the 1976 raid on Entebbe;, and who died there; and the youngest son, Iddo.

The Netanyahus stay at the home of Ruben Blum, a Jewish faculty member. Craziness ensues.

What is Joshua Cohen trying to say about Benzion Netanyahu, his legacy, Zionism. and American Jewry?

The first possibility: The book is an indictment of the Zionism and world view of Bibi Netanyahu, through the creation of an origin story for himself and his ideology.

That origin story starts with Benzion, who was not only a noted scholar of the Inquisition, but who served as the personal secretary to Zeev Jabotinsky, the founder of revisionist Zionism.

The novel immerses its readers in the elder Netanyahus theories about the origins of the Spanish Inquisition, and the origins of racial antisemitism.

Such is the elder Netanyahus world view what others have called the lachrymose view of Jewish history. Wherever we are, we are in trouble.

America was the newest incarnation of Rome, Athens, Babylon, EgyptMitzraim. It was Diasporagalut. And its villainsPharaoh, Nebuchadnezzar, Antiochus, Hadrian, Titus, Haman, Khmelnytsky, Hitler, Stalin, et al.werent individual men perpetrating individual evil of their own accord, so much as they were all just avatars of Amalek, Israels original enemy from the desert. American Jews were just waiting for an Amalek of their ownCarnage was the Jewish destiny and those of us who didnt survive could at least be sure that those who did would interpret our deaths as foreordained and sacrificial

To some extent, Bibi inherits that world view. That becomes his version of statesmanship aggressive, brash, and combative.

Or, perhaps the novel is saying something else.

Perhaps the novel is not an indictment of Netanyahu, Israel and right wing Zionism.

Perhaps it is an indictment of American Jewish ambivalence about Judaism, the Jewish people, and Israel. Or, as the Pulitzer Committee itself noted: the ambiguities of the Jewish-American experience.

Professor Blum is an assimilated Jew. In his upstate New York community, he experiences what we would now call antisemitic microaggressions vendors talking about Jewish cheapness, people wondering about his imagined horns.

Blum describes his New York Jewish childhood as a struggle between conflicting exceptionalisms, between the American condition of being able to choose and the Jewish condition of being chosen. Read that several times. It would be difficult to find a simpler depiction of the internal struggle of the modern Jew.

The Netanyahus are bad guests. More than that, they are an embarrassment to the eager-to-assimilate Blum. By the end of the novel, the Netanyahu family has created utter chaos in the Blum household. Yoni, the future hero and sole Israeli casualty of Entebbe, but at the moment a mere stripling lad, has attempted to have sex with Blums teenage daughter.

When the sheriff comes to the house to investigate the mayhem, he mutters: What a goddamned night. Those f-ing people. Excuse me, Professor Blum. But those f-ing people.

To which Blum responds:

Thank you, Sheriff, and I agree with you about those people. The parents of those boys. Theyre Turkish, you knowTurks . . . what did you expect? . . . just a bunch of crazy Turks . . .

Crazy Turks. Blum needs to off load the Netanyahus. Theyre not Jews, like me. No, they are something else, something even more foreign. Dont blame me, Bloom the New York Jew, for them. I dont know these people. These are not my people.

I was not a fan of Netanyahu. I disliked his policies, his snuggling up to the ultra-Orthodox, his arrogance, his Trumpian behavior. I am glad that he is no longer in power.

But, I did not give Bibi the power to alienate me from Israel itself any more than I allowed my extreme displeasure with Trump to make a dent in my American patriotism.

For many years, even before its inception, the relationship between American Jews and Israel and Zionism has been complicated. American Jews and Israeli Jews simply understand their respective Judaisms in very different ways in ways that go beyond politics, parties, personalities, and policies.

It is not just Bibi. He is now old news. It is the project of Zionism itself which would require a larger elucidation that would require another column.

But, I digress. Read the book. It might outrage you, but there is a good chance that it will delight you and move you intellectually, in a way that few novels can do. And, by the way mazal tov, Joshua!

Your book is the first Jewish book to win the Pulitzer for fiction since Michael Chabons The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay in 2001.

You might just be the heir to the literary throne of the late Philip Roth.

Not so shoddy.

Originally posted here:

The most compelling Jewish novel of the past year - Religion News Service

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