by Joshua Cohen - undifferentiated
First published 2022
Ruben Blum teaches Jewish history at Corbin College in upstate New York during the winter of 1959-1960. The administration places him on a hiring committee to evaluate Benzion Netanyahu, an Israeli scholar who studies the Spanish Inquisition. Blum expects a routine academic interview. Instead, Netanyahu arrives with his entire family and turns Blum's orderly American life upside down. The unexpected guests challenge everything Blum believes about his place in academia and his identity as an assimilated American Jew. What begins as a professional obligation becomes a collision between different ways of being Jewish in the world. Cohen weaves together campus politics, family dynamics, and questions of belonging in this account of how one weekend changed a professor's understanding of himself.
Genres: american-fiction, contemporary, academic, jewish
Vibes: intimate, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: collision-of-cultures, fish-out-of-water
Setting: Corbin College, New York, Spain
Period: 1959-1960, Spanish Inquisition
239 pages · Paperback · Fitzcarraldo Editions