5.2 Writing the Counter-book: Joshua Cohen with Eugene Sheppard (JP)

Eugene Sheppard joins his Brandeis colleague John Plotz to speak with Joshua Cohen about The Netanyahus. Is the 2021 novel a Pulitzer-winning bravura story of the world’s worst job interview? Or is it a searing indictment of ethno-nationalist Zionism–and the strange act of pretense whereby American Jewish writers and thinkers in postwar America pretended that Israel and its more extreme ethno-nationalist strains didn’t concern them?

Cohen dramatizes the return of that repressed by imagining the family of the Benzion Netanyahu (actual medieval Spanish historian and father of Israel’s past and present Prime Minister Bibi)  landing itself on a would-be assimilated American Jewish family ripped straight from the pages of a Philip Roth or Bernard Malamud novel.

With John and Eugene, Joshua dissects the legacy of earlier American Jewish writers like Cynthia Ozick, and offers finer details of how Ze’ev Jabotinksy‘s bellicose views would ultimately take hold in Israel, wisecracking his way to a literally jaw-dropping conclusion….

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Mentioned in this episode:

Zionist and ethnonationalist Ze’ev Jabotinksy (1880-1940): “We must eliminate the Diaspora or the Diaspora will eliminate us.“

Novalis (the German Romantic writer Georg Von Hardenberg) says somewhere “Every book must contain its counter-book.”

Slavoj Zizek makes the case that everything is political including the choice not to have a politics.

Joshua wants readers to think about why celebrated postwar American fiction by Jewish authors like Cynthia Ozick, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth (starting from his 1959 Goodbye Columbus) largely ignores both the Holocaust and Israel until the 1970s or 1980s. Joshua invokes Harold Bloom’s 1973 Anxiety of Influence to explain his relationship to them. He is less interested in Hannah Arendt.

“Shoah Religion” is the way in which the Holocaust came to not only function as a key element in post-war American Jewish identification but also to legitimate the state of Israel (cf Abba Eban’s famous quip “There’s no business like Shoah business“)

Yekke: a German-Jew in Israel or American characterized by an ethos of industrial self-restraint and German culture, satirized in Israeli culture as a man who wears a three piece suit in the middle of summer heat.

Leon Feuchtwanger

“”There’s hope but not for us” Joshua (subtly) quotes a line of Kafka’s that Walter Benjamin (in „Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death‟ from Illuminations) apparently lifted from Max Brod (“Oh Hoffnung genug, unendlich viel Hoffnung, — nur nicht für uns.”)

Yitzhak La’or  “you ever want a poem to become real”

Netanyahu tells the story of the snowy drive to Ithaca (again) in an interview with Barry Weiss.

Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer

Listen and read:

Audio: Writing the Counter-book

Transcript: 5.2 Writing the Counter-book

10.3 Just Slightly Outside the Circle: Peter Orner and Sarah Wasserman (EH) – Novel Dialogue

Chicago is the main character, the setting, the obsession, and the historical grist for the mill of Peter Orner’s most recent novel, The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter (Little Brown and Company, 2025). In conversation about his hometown with Novel Dialogue host Sarah Wasserman, Peter brings us into a lost pocket of time. It is the early 1960s, when Chicagoans partied in a kind of “Midwestern Weimar” and the gossip columnist Irv Kupcinet, holding forth as many as six times a week for 60 years, wrote a garrulous, glamorous story of the city. While the increasingly unhinged narrator of his novel investigates the mysterious death of Kupcinet’s daughter in 1963, Peter delves into his own family’s history, anxiously asking “we can’t hurt our dead, can we?” The novel swerves between fact and fiction, including photographs that are both real artifacts from the historical record and staged photos that participate in the fictional world of the novel. Peter laughs off this contradiction, remarking “the closer I get to real things, the more fictional it becomes.” How to describe such a complicated novel? Sarah offers this gem: “It’s as if Philip Roth were less cancellable and wrote a murder mystery,” a line that results in a poignant conversation about what it means to be Jewish and socially striving in Chicago in middle of the 20th century and what it means to be a cultural outsider, “just slightly outside of the circle.” Peter brings the conversation to a close with a memory of going to the University of Tish.Mentions: Reverend Hightower appears in William Faulkner’s Light in August Irv “Kup” and Essie Kupcinet were Karyn “Cookie” Kupcinet’s parents An Edna O’Brien story appears in Andre Dubus’s Dancing After Hours Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano Phyllis Diller at the Palmer House Bette Howland’s line about Chicago being “the raw materials for a city” appears in Blue in Chicago Alberto Paniagua Philip Roth Tish O’Dowd Ezekiel’s Floaters Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

1. 10.3 Just Slightly Outside the Circle: Peter Orner and Sarah Wasserman (EH) 40:40
2. 10.2 Beautiful Sentences Matter. Billy-Ray Belcourt and Matt Hooley (SW) 43:57
3. 10.1 "Extreme Circumstances, Extreme Reactions:” Aaron Gwyn and Sean McCann (JP) 46:37
4. We Better Laugh About It: A Discussion with Álvaro Enrigue and Maia Gil’Adí 47:03
5. 9.5 Who Owns These Tools? Vauhini Vara and Aarthi Vadde (SW) 48:58