The Netanyahus - An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family

WINNER OF THE 2022 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION

"Absorbing, delightful, hilarious, breathtaking and the best and most relevant novel I’ve read in what feels like forever."—Taffy Brodesser-Akner, The New York Times Book Review

“[C]onstructed with a brilliant comic grace that moves from the sly to the exuberant…The vision in this book is deeply original.”—Colm Tóibín

This Pulitzer prize-winning novel blends fiction and reality for a clever and political take on the campus novel that centers around Jewish history and identity.

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 historical 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.