Book Review: THE NETANYAHUS by Joshua Cohen

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've always had a special fondness for books on teachers or about teaching. Some of my all time faves include campus novels like Wallace Stegner's CROSSING TO SAFETY and John Williams' STONER. I thought this would be similar... BUT NO! It's very much a contemporary novel (published last year and winning the Pulitzer while at it), reflecting 2021's concerns: a divided world increasingly obsessing over racial divides and a capitalist generation growing up core-less.

"I am interested in the antagonisms," says visiting professor Dr. Ben-Zion Netanyahu (father of the Israeli former prime minister, Benjamin). Cohen took a true anecdote shared with him by THE Harold Bloom and wrote a 239 page book that managed to cover so much in a few pages, I'm stunned by the breadth of it!

From a plot perspective, it's about a pulpit-thumping Zionist coming to lecture and basically audition for a permanent teaching job in an American university in the '60's, bringing with him his wife and three sons (two of whom are destined for greatness), and causing much controversy and scandal in a few days. So much crap went down, it's downright crazy!

But Cohen demonstrates his Pulitzer-prize winning prowess by infusing his simple plot with so much family drama, bits and pieces of academic writing, and yes, hilarious biting observations on the question of identity, of generation gaps between hardworking fathers scorned by their entitled, privileged sons, of the antagonism between a secular and religious education, and of the ideology of hatred that results in a future world leader normalizing the persecution of people of a different faith along the Gaza Strip.

It's about Jews, yes, but can also be read as a commentary on how history is taught and disseminated, and politicized by those who understand that he who revises the past is also reshaping a country's future.

Cohen cuts deep. He describes students as "so tolerant of others' psychosocial fragilities and resentments as to become intolerable themselves, junior Torquemadas, sophomoric Savonarolas, finding fault with nearly every remark, finding bigotry and prejudice everywhere."

Cohen says their boredom is borne from "a raging resentment that nothing she can find to do in her life holds any meaning... and every challenge is small, compared to challenges such as how to make a new people in a new land forge a living history." The problem lies in a life "rich in possessions but poor in spirit, petty and forgettable..."

This was the most succinct answer to the question of why so many Filipinos/immigrants supported Trump's politics: "The transmogrification of ancient feuds remains the primary process by which immigrant nativize... to renew a conflict is to acculturate."

There's something special about reading this book on Teachers' Day, and a day that work brought me to my alma mater. Even in pre-pandemic times, I'd be lucky if I got to visit once or twice a year. Each pilgrimage is always a special occasion, as these are moments for introspection while gazing at the Sunken Garden: how much have I changed in fourteen years? (Thankfully, not much internally, although my pants' waistline would disagree!)

Happy Teachers' Day to my fellow brothers-in-arms, and may we continue to fight ignorance in the Motherland, in all its forms!

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