A Jewish protest in New York, 1933.
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I’m a lot like Joshua Cohen. I live in New York, I have a disappointing scraggly beard, I sometimes wear glasses and I can’t stop thinking about Jews. Every day I tell myself I should read about something else, that I should think about someone else, that reading obsessively about yourself like this is really intellectual masturbation — but there they are again, crowding in, taking me down some Wikipedia wormhole, demanding attention — and getting it.
Now the difference between us is, of course, that I work at a think tank mostly dealing with policy responses to offshore finance and he’s one of the most lauded young — I think he can still pull that one off, at 40 — Jewish writers in America. But that’s not what we are here to discuss. It’s his new book The Netanyahus: An Account Of A Minor And Ultimately Even Negligible Episode In The History Of A Very Famous Family.
Upstate New York: there’s snow, an unreformed, old fashioned university and virtually no Jews and here Ruben Blum is making his unhappy way as a Jewish historian — but not, as Cohen keeps on pointing out, nod-nod, wink-wink, as a historian of the Jews. It’s the Sixties. The kind of golf club anti-Semitism that saw a “Jew Quota” put on Harvard is still widespread. Through a series of not particularly funny pastiches of David Lodge, Kingsley Amis and Vladimir Nabokov’s wonderful Pnin, poor old Rube swills around pathetically.
The drama kicks in when he’s informed “one of his own” — a Jewish historian and a historian of the Jews — is on his way from Israel for an interview. Would he take care of him? This is where the novel gets interesting. A letter — so well written I thought about it for days — arrives from a certain Dr Prof Peretz Levavi at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem warning Blum that this man, Professor Ben-Zion Netanyahu, is a rancid, ideological, venomous ultranationalist. Reject him at all costs. And then crashing into his life come Mr and Mrs Netanyahu and their three sons — Yoni, Bibi, Iddo — for a train wreck interview that leaves Rube feeling like the smallest Jew in the world.
It won’t come as a great reveal to learn that something like this really happened. The Netanyahu, little Bibi, who went on to become Prime Minister, really had a father called Ben-Zion who was a brooding, intellectually menacing historian, obsessed with proving that the conversos — Jews who converted to Christianity in medieval Spain and were the victims of the Inquisition — were really sincere converts. And that by racialising them in order to persecute them — by his theory so as to weaken their patrons, the nobility, in the class politics of the day — the Spanish Crown created a world where you could never stop being Jewish. His whole work really a warning to the Diaspora there was no point even trying: you can become a Communist, you can become a Nazi, you can burn an Israeli flag in Time Square — the Inquisition will always come for you.
Ben-Zion’s theories have been called ideological projection. But his impact on the way the Jews would come to see the world was not academic. Small, malevolent, with strangely shaped ears; having felt his Right-wing politics pushed him into American exile when labour Zionists ran the show back in Israel; Ben-Zion really did loom over his son who has ruled Israel for a fifth of his existence, warning that — “Jewish history is the history of Holocausts.” And of course he really was handled by an American Jew, who happened to be Cohen’s friend Harold Bloom, the vaunted literary critic and self-vaunted defender of the Western Canon, when he came to Cornell for his interview.
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SubscribeJust read the essay on feminism and I see the same thing. The writer wants to be special, to be an expert on something. Why not Jewishness or Feminishness, or Blackishness, or Anti-Vaccineishness?
36 years ago, the Times journalist Bernard Levin invented a term, Single Issue Fanatic or SIF. SIFs were people who related everything in their lives to one thought or issue, to the exclusion of everything else. Where I live today, a group of 5 people wanted speed bumps on the main road. They screamed, got arrested by the police (and released, of course), lobbied the local council, stopped council meetings, wrote to newspapers, got onto local television, etc. In the end the council gave in just to shut them up. Today everyone is a SIF. This is great for them and tedious for everyone else.
Are you sure you’re not Jeremy Corbyn?
I would have found a way to introduce the HERO Netanyahu if I was writing any piece mentioning the family. Who of a certain age can forget Yoni Netanyahu who lead the elite commando unit that audaciously rescued almost all hostages at Entebbe Airport, Uganda in 1976. This operation was more audacious and successful than any movie script could conceive and had the world transfixed. He lost his life during the rescue at age 30.
Thanks for this fascinating review and the conclusions it draws. I read the book and was alternately amazed and irritated by it. Joshua Cohen is a writer of great brilliance. I am glad to have confirmed what I was pretty sure was the story’s factual basis. But were the Yahus (yahoos) really that socially horrible? Were the boys that feral? Uncomfortable reading in many places. But agree the letter from the Israeli historian was pure genius.