The Netanyahus

“I have no beliefs and I’m OK with it.”

One of the Arsacid Kings of Armenia begs Constantius II for aid in massacring Persian peasants (circa 350 A.D.) Public Domain.

One of the unfortunate parts of running this blog is that I am bound by honor to publish my schoolwork essays On Here. This month I struggled when writing a piece on The Netanyahus, a 2020 novel by Joshua Cohen. My essay ended up being really short and kind of unfocused so to take an end run around that problem, I’m presenting you with some general thoughts on the book preceding the essay discussing one scene where Cohen stages a thematic confrontation.

I don’t really have a dog in the fight when it comes to literary prizes, but I am glad that Joshua Cohen won the Pulitzer back when The Netanyahus came out. At the time it was still uncommon to see any criticism voiced against Israel, this was the height of the pre-war censorship, around the time I lost a twitter account over the whole thing. While things are worse now in many ways—it’s functionally illegal to criticize Israel—pretty much the entirety of American society under the age of 40 opposes the Israeli state’s long term project. The exceptions to this are all very disagreeable people: direct employees of weaponsmakers, ideological Fascists, affectless policy wonks who think Matt Yglesias deserves the Nobel, and Gen Z men who wear tech-fabric chinos to the office.

This was not true when The Netanyahus came out; at the time the apparatus of ideological surveillance and control of pro-Palestinian speech was both less aggressive and more hegemonic. They did not need to fire and beat and deport people, because there was a tacit support for America’s little protege among a critical plurality of the American educated class. The jewish activists, writers and historians who vocally criticized Israel during that time were invaluable in opening up the possibility of dissent. Whether Cohen’s book moved the needle on this or not is immaterial; it’s a good book, it’s funny and it came out at a time when criticism of Israel was still a universal professional third rail.

The Netanyahus follows the domestic travails of Ruben Blum, the lone tenured jewish professor at Corbindale College, who is tasked with serving on the hiring committee for Ben Zion Netanyahu, the father of the current prime minister of Israel. The most interesting move in Cohen’s work is that it sublimates a criticism of Israeli society into the behavior of the Netanyahus within the American domestic sphere. When the Netanyahus visit Ruben Blum in the winter of 1959-60 they trash his house, wreck the peace of his family and engage in violence almost unthinkingly. It’s a very obvious replay of the Nakba but transposed from the banks of the Jordan to an American living room. It’s a neat device.

Like the victory speech in Oppenheimer, the decision to shift extreme violence from a different place to a small, self-contained American setting is, I think, worthwhile. It keeps the work from breaking its initial perspective or lapsing into moralizing didacticism. The story of the Nakba itself, like the story of Hiroshima, is not best told through the lens of an American academic. If you want direct confrontation with acts of violence read Returning to Haifa by Ghassan Kanafani.

Still, the Netanyahus’ visit to the Blum’s acts as a re-enactment of the Nakba in miniature and as a philosophical negation of the small-d democracy of the American New Deal period. Blum’s wife, after encountering the Netanyahus, is so shaken she says: “Meeting this horrible man and his horrible wife, it made me realize something. It made me realize that I don’t believe in anything anymore and not just that, but I don’t care. I have no beliefs and I’m OK with it.”

I really liked The Netanyahus. Cohen self-consciously blends the assimilationist domestic tragedies of the midcentury jewish writers (there’s some sentence-level Philip Roth-type moves) with the comic novel and the political self-consciousness of the historical novel as imagined by Georgy Lukacs.

If there’s one flaw with The Netanyahus it’s that Cohen, or at least Blum, doesn’t really seem to understand why the Netanyahus might appeal to someone. Ben Zion and his barbarous sons are presented as a tribe of obviously objectionable slobs. The novel makes much of Ben Zion’s pretension to history—he is a polemicist, Blum tells us, incapable of advancing a cogent argument about the past. Netanyahu’s thesis is that Jews (as a coherent racial/religious group) exist outside of history in an unchanging symbolic order and the only way for Judaism to survive outside of a permanent position of antisemitic repression is for the Zionist project to constitute Jews as a nation-in-arms. This is, of course, the official policy of the United States government these days, and was its unofficial policy in 2020.

Then too, the Likudniks and their ilk have successfully transformed Israeli society in the image of the revisionism Cohen spends so much of this novel attacking. This was true in 2020. Revisionism has arguably been ascendant since the Six Days War—a war planned, provoked, carried out, and consolidated by a socialist government. Labor Zionism contained within it a state logic that slid inexorably towards Revisionist Zionism, the opposition between these two competing forces was an historical artefact of the charisma of socialism in the 20th century. The one eventually became the other, as Perry Anderson argues in ‘The House of Zion.’

Cohen’s work doesn’t meaningfully engage with the history of Israel post-1960, despite the narrator ostensibly relating this story in an eternal present. But Ruben Blum has very little to say about the state run by the Prime Minister who once trashed his house. This book is not pessimistic enough.

Bennington essay on The Netanyahus

“‘But democracy says that the people around you are the people you came from,” Judy said. ‘Your neighbors, your fellow citizens.’

‘Who said anything about democracy? I’m talking about the real argument against the fair. Even the least frum, the least religious Jews, like your other grandparents, the yeccas, when they’re dying they’ll start to pray, they’ll start calling up the rabbis. They’ll call up a rabbi and then they’ll tell him, “It’s not fair!”’

‘So that’s your argument against fairness? Seriously? That because death is unfair, we can be too? That we can cheat others because life cheats us?’

Judy cackled, my father lunged—he thrust his hand into the slimy remains of the pie and grabbed its serve, a bright-polished flatfaced wedge like a fancy mason’s trowel with serrated edges tapering sharply and flung off the viscous pumpkin-filling stuck to its tip. ‘I cut cloth forty years, you don’t think I can do your nose, girl?’

That’s when I stood, put myself between them. Reminding my father that I was taller than him. I was wider. I’d had the benefits of American abundance; however fair or not, it’d grown my bones. Let him poke me another navel, I wouldn’t feel it; I was too full to feel it: poke the pouch and all the meal I’d eaten would just slip out.

Edith ducked back into the diningroom: ‘Ruben?’

‘Alter,’ my mother was standing now too.

Judy, presenting her face to my father in serene defiance, said, ‘I dare you.’” (105)

This passage occurs roughly at the midpoint of the book at Thanksgiving in 1959, Ruben already has been asked to serve on the hiring committee for Ben Zion Netanyahu, but Netanyahu has yet to bring his whole family to upstate New York for the tragicomic confrontation at the novel’s heart.

I chose this passage because this is the point where Joshua Cohen physicalizes the thematic and political conflicts. The Netanyahus consists of a set of layered conflicts: there is a family problem, a conflict between historical methodology and polemical thought, and the religious/political confrontation between a secularized, assimilationist Judaism—represented by Judith Blum, who has previously expressed a desire for a smaller nose—and a fearful, diasporic Judaism that is skeptical of democracy and sympathetic to the violent revisionism of the Netanyahus.

The threat of violence by Alter Blum against his granddaughter suggests that he views her desire for assimilation as a ploy; to actually assimilate through changing the body, would really be punishment. Judy introduces the political stakes of this conflict: “democracy” is one’s relations with “Your neighbors, your fellow citizens.” But Alter’s worldview is concerned with a theological pessimism that has little room for political democracy; he supposes that fear and self-serving cynicism are the motivating forces in people’s lives: secularized jewish people have recourse to prayer in the end. This, not death, is what Alter finds unfair; he attends shul in New York City during high holidays, but others neglect their religious commitments.

Alter’s religiosity means he can only spend secular holidays with his family. This irony makes him something of a comical figure; he argues for an austere and death-oriented religion, but he is still perfectly content to eat “American abundance,” and to have filled his son with it. This is why Judith cackles. Her laughter pushes him to be violent, a neat play on the cliche that women fear men will kill them, but men fear that women will laugh at them. Alter frames his threat as punishing/corrective violence, a reassertion of control by patriarchal Judaism — a reading paratextually supported by the novel’s afterword. But that violence emerges from symbols of domesticity and assimilation: There’s a hard tool of control in the pie, an incipient threat of destruction within the secular celebration. Alter can fling “off the viscous pumpkin-filling,” and turn the domestic, secular American holiday implement into a weapon for religious control and for the assertion of ethnic identity.

This play of symbols is, I think, key to the novel’s pessimistic politics. Ben Zion Netanyahu was a political outcast in 1959. His son, in alliance with Evangelical Protestants, has remade Israel in the image of the worst violent tendencies of revisionist Zionism—Cohen stages something of a confrontation between democracy and revisionism in the novel, the small d-democrat, Blum’s wife Edith, comes out of it believing in nothing. The pie server, the violence embedded in the bourgeois domestic order, is common across settler colonies, if such a category of analysis is useful; Blum, as a scholar of taxation in the Jacksonian era, is aware of this. Thanksgiving, too, is a holiday celebrating a conquest process. The conflict between Judith and Alter is broken up by Ruben, but and violent confrontation is delayed until the next chapter.

Alter ultimately does break Judy’s nose, but not using a pie server. She tricks him into kicking open a door while she waits on the other side, face pressed to the knob. The resulting injury requires reconstructive surgery. Cohen foreshadows this here. But a new nose does not save Judy from gendered violence in the domestic sphere, and the assault she eventually suffers by Jonathan Netanyahu is foreshadowed as well, though more subtly.

Cohen’s novel works because it foregrounds its political and theological conflicts and plays them out through explicit character confrontations; symbols of domesticity and latent violence add a secondary layer of interpretation. It is easy to imagine a version of The Netanyahus where this conflict is subdued, playing out in dialogue or in subtle gesture, instead of political monologues and threats of (and actual) violence. That might be a conventional approach: subordinating political concerns to the mechanics of scene and the conceits of a staid realism. But I think Cohen’s book shows why that approach to political writing is often a failure.

There aren’t many overt formal moves that Cohen uses in this passage, most of the action happens in dialogue or is simply narrated by Ruben, and we only get a little access to his head: “Let him poke me another navel, I wouldn’t feel it; I was too full to feel it: poke the pouch and all the meal I’d eaten would just slip out.” This allows the tension between Judy and Alter to drive the scene and to stand without comment.

Note: That’s about where I hit the page count for my annotation as prescribed by my prof, so that’s all for now folks.

Next Week: Bright Lights Big City and TikTok Censorship.

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