Which novel by Joshua Cohen won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2022?

Which novel by Joshua Cohen won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2022? The answer is The Netanyahus.

Published in 2021 by New York Review Books, The Netanyahus is a comic, intellectually intricate novel about a fictionalized academic encounter involving Benzion Netanyahu, a historian and father of Israel’s future prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Its narrator, Ruben Blum, is a Jewish history professor at a small American college who becomes involved when Benzion visits campus for a job interview.

The book won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Its full title, The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family, signals Cohen’s blend of campus novel, historical fiction, satire, and invented documentary. The story uses an apparently minor academic incident to examine Jewish identity, Zionism, American assimilation, and the politics of historical memory.

The title is easy to confuse with Philip Roth’s The Counterlife and The Plot Against America, both also associated with Jewish-American literary fiction, or with Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. Those are separate novels and did not win the 2022 Pulitzer for Fiction.