Join the Institute for a Book Talk with Joshua Cohen, recipient of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, for his book, The Netanyahus. *This event is in-person.

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, The Netanyahus is a wildly inventive, genre-bending comedy of blending, identity, and politics that finds Joshua Cohen at the height of his powers.

Joshua Cohen was born in 1980 in Atlantic City. His books include the novels The Netanyahus, Moving Kings, Book of Numbers, Witz, A Heaven of Others, and Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto; the short fiction collection Four New Messages, and the non-fiction collection Attention: Dispatches from a Land of Distraction. Called "a major American writer" by the New York Times, and "an extraordinary prose stylist, surely one of the most prodigious at work in American fiction today" by the New Yorker, Cohen was awarded Israel’s 2013 Matanel Prize for Jewish Writers, and in 2017 was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. The Netanyahus won the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2022.

Supported by the generosity of the Radov Family.

Note that proof of vaccination is required to enter Columbia University buildings.

While all Institute events are free and open to the public, we do encourage a suggested donation of $10.