Joshua Cohen won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for his novel, The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family.
The book presents a fictionalized account of an awkward event in the life of major American literary critic Harold Bloom. An American professor is called upon to play host to medieval historian Benzion Netanyahu and his family, including his son, Benjamin Netanyahu, at an upstate New York college in the late 1950s. With humor and keen insight, the novel dramatizes cultural and intellectual clashes between American and Israeli Jews.
Along with the Pulitzer, The Netanyahus is the winner of the 2021 National Jewish Book Award for Fiction, a finalist for the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and one of the 10 Best Books of 2021 (The Wall Street Journal), 100 Notable Books of 2021 (The New York Times), Best Fiction Books of the Year, (Kirkus), 15 Best Books of 2021 (The A.V. Club), 24 Best Fiction Books of 2021 (The Times), Best Fiction Books of 2021 (The Telegraph), and 20 Best Books of theYear (The New Statesman).
Cohen is also a contributor to the bilingual 2023 Hebrew-English anthology, Shelter, October 7th and After, edited by Oded Wolkstein and Maayan Eitan, a soul-searching exploration of the idea of refuge and safety in Jewish history and experience.
