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46 pages 1 hour read

Joshua Cohen

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

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021

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Chapters 11-12 and Extra CreditChapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 11 Summary

Ruben and Ben-Zion are walking in the snow following the interview. Ben-Zion compares Ruben to the quintessential Court Jew. He says he doesn’t care whether Ruben decides to hire him, but he does ask Ruben to make sure he gets paid for his subsequent lecture.

At the Corbindale Inn, they discover that the reservation for Ben-Zion’s room has been canceled. They find their wives waiting in the taproom. Edith is furious with Tzila because she canceled the room when the hotel wouldn’t give them a second room because they are overbooked, and then decided she and her family would stay with the Blums. Tzila also decided that Judy would watch the boys free of charge.

Soon, the others from the committee show up at the hotel. They talk about sports. Dr. Morse has Ruben check his introduction for the lecture. He has simply used Ben-Zion’s cover letter, slightly altered. They have dinner together and then head off to the lecture hall.

Chapter 12 Summary

Ben-Zion begins his lecture. He begins with a brief introduction to Jewish history in Medieval Iberia. Ruben summarizes his thesis: For the first time in history the Jews came to be seen as a race rather than a religion. The reason for the Spanish Inquisition was to root out the Jews who converted to Christianity in the centuries before and drive them back into Judaism. The Spanish crown needed an interior enemy to help them break the power of the Spanish nobility. The lecture then takes on a tinge of political propaganda, culminating in the need for a Jewish state because American assimilation is a falsehood, i.e., American Jews will never be fully American. After the lecture Ruben feels “false. My suit, my tie, my pipe, my skin all felt a costume” (217).

After the lecture, the group then walks home with Dr. Morse. Ruben tries to make light of the situation of having to house the Netanyahus, which just makes Edith angrier. Edith talks about how opinionated they were when they were younger, but after meeting Ben-Zion and Tzila, she realizes she doesn’t believe in anything anymore, which she finds reassuring and positive.

When they arrive home, they find the youngest boy asleep in the remnants of a gingerbread house with the new TV lying on its face, broken. The older boys are found upstairs. Benjamin is playing lookout while Jonathan is having sex with Judy. The older boys escape, and Ruben, Ben-Zion, and Tzila go looking for them in the broken Ford. The cops are called, and the boys are found in a poor section of Corbindale. The sheriff drives Ruben home. On parting, Ruben mentions to the sheriff that the Netanyahus are Turkish.

Credits and Extra Credit Summary

Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s body was moved from New York to Jerusalem in 1964 and was buried next to Theodor Herzl. In 1974, Jonathan Netanyahu was killed-in-action during the hostage rescue mission of the Israeli General Staff Reconnaissance Unit (Sayeret Matkal) in Entebbe, Uganda. Benjamin went into politics. Iddo became a radiologist and writer. Iddo refused to meet with Joshua Cohen. Cohen talks about meeting Harold Bloom for the first time and being questioned about writing, literature, and the publishing world. He talks about Bloom’s prestigious memory, how well he could recall things he’d read. Cohen gets Bloom to talk about his personal history and all the famous writers and philosophers he’d met over the years. Cohen then discusses what Bloom told him about meeting Ben-Zion Netanyahu. Jeanne Bloom, Harold’s wife, confirms Harold’s story about what happened, but Cohen had to fill in blanks and fictionalize certain aspects of the story. Ruben Blum is not supposed to be Harold Bloom, though the Netanyahus remain the Netanyahus. Judy is not the Bloom’s daughter, and Cohen did his best to construct Judy in way that was not at all reminiscent of the female relative who had lived with Harold and Jeanne for a while. When Cohen finished the book, he sent a copy to “Judy.” She wrote a scathing email back to him denouncing Jews, “Patriarchal Hegemony” (239), and his preoccupation with a history that never mattered.

Chapters 11-12, Credits and Extra Credit Analysis

In Chapters 11 and 12, the cultural differences between the Netanyahus and the Rubens are further accentuated. Tzila is shown to be pushy, domineering, and antagonistic from an American perspective (i.e., Edith’s perspective). The antagonism between the two women leads Edith to declare not only her disgust with Tzila and the others but also her newfound happiness in not being like them and being devoid of both religious and ideological beliefs. In other words, she finds contentment in her life as an American housewife from the upper middle-class when the alternative is to be like Tzila. This declaration reverts to the observation Ruben made in Chapter 4 regarding Sigmund Freud’s “Narzissmus der kleinen Differenzen” (60) and the acculturation of groups defining themselves through the petty differences between one another. In other words, Edith is content with her form of Jewishness because she feels more American and more tolerable than Tzila’s version. These differences also contribute to Cohen’s exploration of Jewish stereotypes, particularly those relating to money. Edith finds Tzila’s insistence that Judy to watch the Netanyahu boys without pay offensive and miserly in addition to it simply being a faux pas in American culture. In Chapter 11, Ben-Zion is anxious about the university not paying him his lecture fee even though Ruben does his best to assure him that the system doesn’t operate in that fashion. Tzila’s expectation of free babysitting and Ben-Zion’s concern that his expertise will be taken advantage of is a result of their financial strain, culture, and personal experience rather than a trait that is supposedly inherently Jewish.

Ruben’s greatest takeaway from Ben-Zion’s lecture is the argument that a lasting result of the Inquisition was its racial definition of Jew and that any subsequent Jewish person would be unable to fully acculturate, forever remaining an outsider as a member of the Jewish Diaspora. In other words, Ruben could never not be a Jew and could never be a full American. Furthermore, it was an argument for all Jews to return to Israel, which ties in with how Ben-Zion dealt with Ruben in Chapter 11, specifically when they are walking to the Corbindale Inn. Ben-Zion, like Ruben, is well aware of their cultural and personal differences. However, Ben-Zion believes much more in Jewish camaraderie and solidarity: “And if the situation were reversed […] and you came to Israel, I’m not positive I could get you a job, but I’d do absolutely everything to find you a good apartment, and in a war, I’d die for you” (193). This statement not only attempts to have Ruben see the situation from Ben-Zion’s perspective and show his fraternity to other Jews, but also it is a subtle invitation for Ruben to leave the Diaspora and come to Israel. Of course, Ruben has no desire to go to Israel, and this lack of desire is only strengthened through the behavior of the Netanyahu boys and Tzila blaming Judy and Edith for Jonathan being naked in the snow. Seeing this behavior and conflict, Ruben wishes to distance himself as much as possible from the type of Jewishness embodied by the Netanyahus. In fact, the end scene between the two men not only shows Ruben’s desire to distance himself, but also shows Ruben fully taking on board Ben-Zion’s lesson in Chapter 12 that with the change in meaning of Jew from someone who practices Judaism to that of someone of an ethnic group, Jews were forced into a racial definition that would forever hinder them from assimilating into the nations they inhabited, which includes the United States. In understanding that he will always be seen and judged by his Jewishness, he chooses to deny the Netanyahus their Jewishness by telling the sheriff the Netanyahus are Turks instead of Jews to protect the image of his own family in the eyes of his community, or to extend the metaphor from Chapter 2, the church of assumption.

Ben-Zion criticizes American ethnic diversities for being unable to fully proclaim allegiance to democracy, focusing on their ethnic differences rather than their political and cultural similarities. In essence, he attempts to answer the question Ruben has been asking himself since his childhood about whether he can fully integrate into American society as a Jew. Ben-Zion’s answer is no: A Jew will always be a Jew first and American second. Regardless of the veracity of this statement, which Ben-Zion poses as more of a warning to American society than an indictment, Ruben finds confirmation in it, and he accepts his irrevocable, unalterable status as the university’s Court Jew and demarcates the separation between American Jew and Israeli Jew by referring to the Netanyahus as Turks.

The end of the novel (Credits and Extra Credit), after the Ruben/Netanyahu plot has come to its close, Joshua Cohen inserts aspects of metafiction and historicity. Credit is given to the true Netanyahu family in the form of historically verifiable facts about the various characters with no attempt at poetic license. However, the credits deal solely with those parts of the Netanyahus’ lives that happened after the supposed events in the novel. Therefore, the credit section provides acknowledgement of the real Netanyahus upon which the characters are based, but it is also an attempt at historicity, which serves to blur the lines between fact and fiction. The Extra Credit section is pure self-referential metafiction. Cohen’s comments about the fictionalization of the Judy character and the purported reiteration of the email from her real-life counterpart reminds the reader that the book is fictional, but whether the email is real reminds the reader the novel is influenced by real people independent of the narrative. In the vein of the utility of history and its interpretation, Joshua Cohen proposes one interpretation and invites the reader to interpret that interpretation and judge its veracity for themself.

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