The Netanyahus (2022 Pulitzer Prize)

Winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 

Winner of the 2021 Jewish Book Award 

Shortlisted for the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award

今年獎落納坦雅胡家！大離散與國族身分的反覆辯證。

Corbin College, not-quite-upstate New York, winter 1959-1960: Ruben Blum, a Jewish historian—but not an historian of the Jews—is co-opted onto a hiring committee to review the application of an exiled Israeli scholar specializing in the Spanish Inquisition. 

When Benzion Netanyahu shows up for an interview, family unexpectedly in tow, Blum plays the reluctant host, to guests who proceed to lay waste to his American complacencies. 

Mixing fiction with non-fiction, the campus novel with the lecture, The Netanyahus is a wildly inventive, genre-bending comedy of blending, identity, and politics. 

‘Cohen’s style – inventive but elegantly understated – is a class act that few of his contemporaries can follow. All in all, this is a veritable triumph.’

— Andrew Gallix, The Irish Times

‘Joshua Cohen’s novel, The Netanyahus is a clever, funny story about Jewish history, the world of academia, the meaning of the Diaspora and losing one’s Jewish soul.’

— Aaron Howard, Jewish Herald-Voice

‘The Netanyahus is a generational campus novel, an unyielding academic lecture, a rigorous meditation on Jewish identity, an exhaustive meditation on Jewish-American identity, a polemic on Zionism, a history lesson. It is an infuriating, frustrating, pretentious piece of work—and also absorbing, delightful, hilarious, breathtaking and the best and most relevant novel I’ve read in what feels like forever.’

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner, New York Times