The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family

Ruben Blum, the only Jewish faculty member at a fictional upstate college, gets stuck as the designated liaison for Benzion Netanyahu's job talk purely because of his last name — a sharp, still-current satire of the tokenized burden placed on minority academics to represent, host, and vouch for anyone else who shares their category. That administrative absurdity sets up a real ideological collision: Blum's assimilated, ambivalent, essentially secular American Jewishness against Benzion's totalizing historical thesis, drawn from the actual historian's real scholarship on the Spanish Inquisition, that antisemitism isn't a contingent, era-specific prejudice but a fixed, near-metaphysical feature of gentile societies that only Zionist statehood can escape.

Cohen stages the domestic chaos of hosting young Bibi and his siblings — destructive, feral, a home-invasion-scale weekend — directly alongside the weighty historical argument being delivered in the same visit, and refuses to let either register fully explain or contain the other. The joke and the argument run on separate tracks that keep colliding: history, when it actually shows up at your door, arrives dragging its unglamorous, chaotic human cargo behind it, and no amount of theoretical rigor about the Inquisition prepares Blum's household for an actual Netanyahu child loose in it.

The novel's subtitle — an account of a minor and ultimately even negligible episode in the history of a very famous family — is the book's central joke and its real method: Cohen writes the entire novel as a footnote to a significance the story itself never states outright, betting that readers will supply what an adult Benjamin Netanyahu later became. Cohen has said the premise originated in an anecdote told to him by Harold Bloom about hosting the real Benzion Netanyahu at Cornell, and the novel's pleasure is watching real intellectual and political history get transposed into farce without losing its seriousness in the process.

Blum's own wife and daughter, largely sidelined by the men's historical argument, register the visit's damage in more immediate terms — a household disrupted, a marriage strained, a family's ordinary equilibrium wrecked for a weekend by other people's ideology and other people's children. Cohen's willingness to let that domestic cost sit unresolved alongside the novel's grander historical claims is itself an argument: the sweep of history and the mess it leaves in one particular kitchen are never actually separable, however much the men doing the theorizing would prefer to keep them apart.