At the center of Joshua Cohen’s new novel is an encounter between Benzion Netanyahu—the Jewish historian, personal secretary to Vladimir Jabotinsky, and father of the former prime minister—and a fictional American Jewish college professor named Ruben Blum. Ben Judah writes in his review:

The Netanyahus . . . was one of those highly irritating novels: so interesting I couldn’t stop reading it, without ever being sure I was actually enjoying it. As a kosher smorgasbord of ideas it is wonderful: a car journey to the Catskills worth of fun arguments. As a piece of fiction—until the very last, brilliant chapter—it didn’t do it for me. The problem isn’t Benzion: everything about him is fantastically conjured. The problem is Rube, his wife Edith, and the whole family of caricatures set up in opposition. This makes the novel mostly a drag.

I think these thinly drawn characters—the unassuming, uninsightful Rube Blum, next to the incredible, unforgettable, Benzion Netanyahu—takes us back to Cohen’s obsessions, and mine. We’re not really obsessed with Jews. We’re obsessed with dead Jews or we’re obsessed with Israelis. The way The Netanyahus seems to rush through its plot, ticking off what we are supposed to know about American Jews—father worked in the rag trade, tick, daughter wants a nose job, tick—to get to Benzion reflects something much deeper. Wherever the energy is in American Jewish letters right now, . . . it is about Israel. Wherever the crazes are—Fauda (the secret missions of the IDF) [or] Shtisel (the secret lives of ultra-Orthodox Jerusalem)—it is not about us as Americans, as Diaspora Jews, but them.

Roth. Malamud. Bellow. They were fascinated by Jews as Americans—it was a constant exploration for them—in a way that Rube feels like homework both for Cohen and for the reader, until we get to Ben-Zion and the good stuff. Maybe those novels of the immigrant experience can’t be written by [today’s American Jews]. We are bored of ourselves.

Addressing a recent meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Committee, Mahmoud Abbas criticized Hamas more sharply than he has previously (at least in public), calling them “sons of dogs.” The eighty-nine-year-old Palestinian Authority president urged the terrorist group to “stop the war of extermination in Gaza” and “hand over the American hostages.” The editors of the New York Sun comment:

Mr. Abbas has long been at odds with Hamas, which violently ousted his Fatah party from Gaza in 2007. The tone of today’s outburst, though, is new. Comparing rivals to canines, which Arabs consider dirty, is startling. Its motivation, though, was unrelated to the plight of the 59 remaining hostages, including 23 living ones. Instead, it was an attempt to use an opportune moment for reviving Abbas’s receding clout.

[W]hile Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians soared after its orgy of killing on October 7, 2023, it is now sinking. The terrorists are hoarding Gaza aid caches that Israel declines to replenish. As the war drags on, anti-Hamas protests rage across the Strip. Polls show that Hamas’s previously elevated support among West Bank Arabs is also down. Striking the iron while it’s hot, Abbas apparently longs to retake center stage. Can he?

Diminishing support for Hamas is yet to match the contempt Arabs feel toward Abbas himself. Hamas considers him irrelevant for what it calls “the resistance.”

[Meanwhile], Abbas is yet to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre. His recent announcement of ending alms for terror is a ruse.

Abbas, it’s worth noting, hasn’t saved all his epithets for Hamas. He also twice said of the Americans, “may their fathers be cursed.” Of course, after a long career of anti-Semitic incitement, Abbas can’t be expected to have a moral awakening. Nor is there much incentive for him to fake one. But, like the protests in Gaza, Abbas’s recent diatribe is a sign that Hamas is perceived as weak and that its stock is sinking.