Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus:
An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family
Sunday, March 3, 2024
7 PM
Shalom Park
Levine-Sklut Judaic Library
Join us for Opening Night of the Jewish Book Festival with Pulitzer Prizewinning Author Joshua Cohen
Author Talk, Q&A, Book Signing
Books may be purchased online at https://bookshop.org/shop/jewishcharlotte or at the event. Online purchases will support Independent Bookstores and the Center for Jewish Education.
For the complete book festival experience, purchase the Book Festival Package here.
Purchase individual event tickets below.
About the Book:
Winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, The Netanyahus has been called "absorbing, delightful, hilarious, breathtaking and the best and most relevant novel ... in what feels like forever." (New York Times Book Review). The Wall Street Journal called its author, Joshua Cohen, "America's most perceptive and imaginative Jewish novelist, (and) one of its best novelists full stop".
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 nonfiction, the campus novel with the lecture, The Netanyahus is a wildly inventive, genre-bending comedy of blending, identity, and politics that finds Joshua Cohen at the height of his powers.
About the Author:
Joshua Cohen is the author of the novels The Netanyahus, Moving Kings, Book of Numbers, Witz, A Heaven of Others, and Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto; the short fiction collection Four New Messages, and the non-fiction collection Attention: Dispatches from a Land of Distraction. Called "a major American writer" by the New York Times, and "an extraordinary prose stylist, surely one of the most prodigious at work in American fiction today" by the New Yorker, Cohen was awarded Israel’s 2013 Matanel Prize, and in 2017 was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. The Netanyahus won the 2021 National Jewish Book Award for Fiction and the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
