The Netanyahus – Details, episodes & analysis

With Pushkin+ audiobooks, you'll get access to a new Pushkin+ audiobook every other month. From November 1 to December 31 get the Pulitzer Prize winner The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen. Pushkin+ subscribers also get access to ad-free listening, exclusive bonus episodes of podcasts like Cautionary Tales, full binges to new shows like Gone: The Disappearances, and more. Sign up now on The Netanyahus show page or at pushkin.com/plus.

Blending history and fiction, The Netanyahus is a hilarious fictionalized retelling of Harold Bloom’s encounter with the Netanyahu family at an upstate New York college in the late 1950s, by an author The Washington Post has called “maybe America’s greatest living writer.”

Corbin College, not quite upstate New York, winter 1959–1960: Ruben Blum, a Jewish historian—but not an historian of the Jews—is co-opted onto a hiring committee to review the application of an exiled Israeli scholar specializing in the Spanish Inquisition. When Benzion Netanyahu shows up for an interview, family unexpectedly in tow, Blum plays the reluctant host to guests who proceed to lay waste to his American complacencies. Mixing fiction with nonfiction, the campus novel with the lecture, Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus audiobook is a wildly inventive, genre-bending comedy of blending, identity, and politics that finds Joshua Cohen at the height of his powers.