The Netanyahus, An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family.

On Wednesday, September 14, the Institute welcomed Joshua Cohen, recipient of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, for his book The Netanyahus, An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family.

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.

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IIJS@Home: Jews Of Eastern Europe Series, Part I: Book Talk With Saul Noam Zaritt And Samuel Spinner

On Wednesday, September 21, the Institute had the first of a two part series on The Jews of Eastern Europe featuring Saul Noam Zaritt, author of Jewish American Writing and World Literature: Maybe to Millions, Maybe to Nobody and Samuel Spinner, author of Jewish Primitivism.

Until the Second World War, Eastern Europe was home to the largest Jewish community in the world. This demographic concentration fostered the development of many important religious, cultural, literary, and political movements that continue to define Jewish life to this day. Focusing on recent scholarship that deals with Yiddish literature and Jewish life in interwar Yiddishland, this book series hopes to shed light on how the history of this important Jewish community a century ago has much to teach us today.

IIJS@Home: Speer Goes To Hollywood

On August 16, we welcomed the co-director, co-writer and co-producer of Speer goes to Hollywood, Vanessa Lapa. Albert Speer was one of Hitler’s closest confidants and his chief architect, tasked with rebuilding Berlin as the capital of a global empire. Appointed Minister of Armaments and War production in 1942, Speer was responsible for 12 million slave laborers. And yet, even now, he has the reputation of being the "good Nazi" – a myth he constructed himself with his bestselling memoir, Inside the Third Reich.