The Netanyahus is a 2021 novel by Joshua Cohen.
The narrator is a retired professor, Ruben Blum, who is telling a story from decades ago, specifically, 1959-60. Ruben is a historian on a tenure track at Corbin University, a small school in upstate New York. He's married to a woman named Edith and they have a daughter, Judith, who will soon be graduating from high school. Ruben is literally the first Jew that Corbin has hired for any position, and he has to deal with what would later be called "microaggressions." Like how despite the fact that he's Jewish, he's asked to play Santa at the faculty Christmas party, because he has a beard. Edith for her part does not really like the extremely WASPy town they live in and Judith is just generally a surly teen.
Into the lives of all those fictional people comes a Real Life family. Because he is the only Jew in the faculty, Ruben is asked to oversee the hiring of another Jewish professor, one Benzion Netanyahu
. Dr. Netanyahu's radical right-wing views have made him mostly unemployable in Israel and he's coming to Corbin because he needs the work. Prof. Blum is surprised to find that Dr. Netanyahu is unpleasant and abrasive and his wife Tzila is just as obnoxious. Things get even worse when the Blums find themselves hosting Mr. and Mrs. Netanyahu and their three awful, bratty sons: 14-year-old Yonathan, 10-year old Benjamin, and seven-year-old Iddo.
Tropes:
- Bland-Name Product: Corbin University is a stand-in for Cornell, where Benzion Netanyahu taught.
- Bratty Teenage Daughter: Judith is surly and hostile. She pesters her parents for a nose job. She's adopted stridently left-wing political views and can be quite the Soapbox Sadie. Judith finds religion naive and winds up goading Ruben's parents into a nasty confrontation at a family dinner.
- Central Theme: Jewish life in America, and how much Jews can really assimilate into mainstream American life. Ruben mostly rejects Benzion's stridently pessimistic, hostile worldview, but some of the things Netanyahu says, like how Ruben's "friends" wouldn't be there for him if fascism came to America, hit home. There's also a sub-theme about how different parts of the Jewish-American community get along; Edith's cultured Austrian parents look down on Ruben's parents who are immigrants from Ukraine.
- Dream Sequence: Ruben has a strange dream in which Judy's high school has become a sort of torture chamber and secret police lair.
- Hiding Behind the Language Barrier: Edith tries to do this in order to talk bad about the Netanyahus, speaking in Yiddish, but Ruben reminds her that the Netanyahus obviously know Yiddish. They do, and Benzion does this successfully when he badmouths and insults all the other faculty at a reception while Ruben cringes.
- Historical Domain Character: The entire Netanyahu family, who make an unpleasant impression on their host.
- I Need a Freaking Drink: One day of playing host to the Netanyahu clan has Edith getting drunk at a bar.Edith: Just a little, Rube. I need it.
- Malicious Misnaming: Part of Sabine's generally snide attitude toward Ruben's new job shows when she repeatedly calls the city that Ruben moved to "Corbinton" instead of its correct name of Corbindale.
- Obnoxious In-Laws: Ruben's in-laws, and especially his mother-in-law Sabine, who plainly does not like him and carps and criticizes everything he does—not doing his share of the housework, leaving New York City and relocating to a WASP town upstate, etc.
- Parents Walk In at the Worst Time: The big comic scene that ends the book has the Blums and Netanyahus coming home from a faculty reception to catch Yonathan and Judith in the act of having sex, while Benjamin masturbates outside. The boys run out into the neighborhood, Benjamin in his pajamas and Yonathan stark naked, while Edith is left to get in a shouting match with a naked Judith inside the house.
- Raging Stiffie: If catching Yonathan and Judy having sex wasn't bad enough, Ruben has to see a terrified Yonathan run right past him, his erect penis bouncing as he goes.
- Separated by a Common Language: Among Benzion's many abrasive habits is a contempt for American English. His wife asks what the things you put under cups on the dinner table are called and Ruben answers "Coasters." Benzion sneers that "In real English, they call them mats."
- Short Title: Long, Elaborate Subtitle: The full title is actually The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family.
- Slice of Life: There's no real story as such. It's simply a portrait of a professor grappling with the particular issue of being a Jew in a very Gentile environment, and how his life was disrupted by the arrival of an obnoxious but thought-provoking Israeli professor and that professor's awful family.
- Sizable Semitic Nose: Judy is harassing her parents, demanding a nose job that Ruben and Edith don't want her to get. This is eventually resolved when Judy deliberately arranges to get her nose smashed by a doorknob, forcing her parents to have her nose reconstructed, smaller.
- Take That!: Tzila has nothing but contempt for the small towns of Pennsylvania and New York."And Scranton," Tzila went on, what an ugly city. You go through Wilkes Boothnote and you think how ugly can a town get? Is there anything uglier? And then you leave Wilkes Booth and go through Scranton and there's your answer."
- Very Loosely Based on a True Story: All five of the Netanyahus are real people and Benzion did in fact teach at more than one American college when he was young, and Benzion's controversial historical views are described accurately. In an epilogue Joshua Cohen claims that the novel was Inspired by… some stories that Real Life writer Harold Bloom shared about his experiences with Benzion Netanyahu back in the day.
- "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: An epilogue has Cohen relating some true history about the Netanyahus (Yonathan became a hero and martyr, Benjamin became PM of Israel) and some fiction (Judith Blum grew up to be a hippie lesbian).
- Young Future Famous People: Yonathan became one of the great heroes and martyrs of Israeli history when he led, and was killed during, the famous raid on Entebbe Airport. Benjamin Netanyahu became the longest-serving Prime Minister of Israel. (Third son Iddo has kept a lower profile, working as a doctor and playwright.)
