Jews on Campus: Zionism, Postcoloniality, and History in Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus

Abstract This article builds on the institutional turn in literary studies by reading Joshua Cohen’s 2021 novel The Netanyahus through the lens of the feedback loop between the institution of the university and the production of contemporary fiction, revealing the novel’s engagement with a set of discourses that have shaped academic criticism since the 1970s. This reading challenges the immediate critical response to the novel, which—drawing on the dominant critical approach in Jewish American literary studies—understood the novel as exemplary of how Jewish American literary works reflect an established and sociologically grounded narrative about the history of Jews in America. Instead, this article understands Cohen’s novel as a metacritical reflection on the disciplinary pressures that shape the production and reception of contemporary Jewish American literature, examining the novel in relation to three key themes: Jewish American literary history and the disciplinary tensions between Jewishness and multiculturalism in the academy; the history of literary criticism and the changing nature of the university as refracted through the genres of the “campus novel” and “historical fiction”; and the role of postcolonial theory and function of Israel in contemporary Jewish American literature in the novel’s racialized othering of the Netanyahu family.