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.
Read more on UnHerd: https://unherd.com/2021/06/how-american-jews-lost-themselves/