Jewish Otherness in Joshua Cohen’s THE NETANYAHUS: race, postcoloniality, and the possibility of escape from Jewish American clichés

• In Event: Jewish Difference Across Borders

Abstract

Joshua Cohen’s 2021 novel THE NETANYAHUS stages a confrontation – set in 1960 – between Ruben Blum, the assimilating son of Eastern European New York Jews, and Ben-Zion Netanyahu, the Revisionist Zionist firebrand and father of the current Prime Minister of Israel. The confrontation between these two representatives (and representations) of Jewish identity – the diasporic and the Zionist – is the occasion for Cohen’s play with many of the tropes associated with Jewish American assimilation: the antisemitism of post-war academia’s WASP elites, the class-inflected tensions between German and Eastern European Jews, and the exodus of Jews from the city to the suburbs. This paper argues that a close reading of Cohen’s novel, using the tools of postcolonial theory, reveals the buried operations of racialization that simultaneously underpin and disrupt these tropes. Through an examination of the ‘Zionist Otherness’ I read in the novel’s portrayal of Netanyahu and his family, I argue for a reframing of Jewishness as a signifier of difference and a contested site for the construction of racial Otherness in the context of the United States. This reading pushes against straightforward understandings of a Jewish move into ‘whiteness’ and raises a wider set of questions around the disciplinary position, and critical apparatus, of Jewish American studies in the American university. There has so far been limited academic analysis published on the novel itself (with the exception of a short discussion in a recent essay by Hana Wirth-Nesher), but by drawing on the work of scholars working in the field of Critical Jewish Studies – in particular that of Jonathan Freedman, Bryan Cheyette, and Benjamin Schreier – this paper proposes an innovative reading of THE NETANYAHUS which problematizes the clichés of assimilation that shaped the novel’s immediate critical reception and that continue to underpin scholarly and popular accounts of Jewish American literature more broadly.

Author

• Nicolas Turner, Leiden University