The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family – Joshua Cohen
Read: Oct. 16th 2023
Published: 2021
Country: USA
Incredible. Probably funniest book I’ve ever read. Cohen is a genius. Bibi forevermore will be associated in my mind as a lil creepy loser flicking a babies penis.
Quotes:
- “Goys believe in the Word becoming Flesh, but Jews believe in the Flesh becoming Word, a more natural, rational incarnation . . ..”
- “It was never lost on at least me and Edith that the stupid quips about cheapness by the Maytag repairman who fixed our appliances were uniquely soft and ineffective weapons in the annals of anti-Semitism —so much so that to regard them as harmful felt impertinent, disrespectful of the ancestors.”
- “He wore his averageness lightly, almost proudly, like a transparent scholar’s gown, underneath which he was nakedly an administrator. His WASP complacency was astounding, at least to a fusser like me, a child of the Garment District. Nowadays, they’d call his condition something like privilege, I guess.”
- “The complete calmness, the complete comfortability, the totally untroubled capacity to relax inside of one’s own blanched-dry dermal girdle that comes from being swaddled in money, bonds, and stock certificates from birth, a patrimony honed at Groton, Yale, and Harvard.”
- “It was the differences in history that got to me the most. The history in my regular schooling was all about progress, a world that brightened with the Enlightenment and steadily improved; a world that would continue to improve illimitably, so long as every country kept trying to be more like America and America kept trying to be more like itself. The past was merely the process by which the present was attained, and the present merely the most current stage of the American superlative, to be overtaken by tomorrow’s liberation and capital’s spread, until the ultimate transfiguration of world history into world democracy.”
- “Rather, there was time, as round and perfect as the earth, which from the moment it emerged from God’s spoken light had been marked by a constant repetition, not of seasons, or harvests, or astral phenomena and the holidays they governed, but of oppression, violence, and death; between the recurrences of which was a perpetual waiting for a tarrying messiah, whom my public-schoolmates were convinced had already come—the messiah had already come and we, I, had failed to notice . . . maybe because we, though not I, were too busy being slaughtered.”
- “Why did the Church restore to Judaism the very converts it had just spent the better part of the Crusades trying to obtain, according to Dr. Netanyahu? Because the converts were bad Catholics? No, not all of them. Or because they were too good at being Catholic? No, not all of them either. Rather, the reason was because: as long as the Catholics still required a people to hate, the Jews had to remain a people doomed to suffer.”
- “In America,” he returned to Judy, “they tell you to mix with non-Jews, marry non-Jews, run away from your tradition, get a new name, get a new nose, change who you are, eat a turkey like an Indian, and in return you get fairness. That’s the deal. And so you change it all and then go to collect this fairness you were promised but all the offices where you make your claim are closed, because this country never holds up its half of the bargain.”
- “The Spanish Inquisition, he claimed, introduced the idea that a person could not essentially change or be changed, but was in fact defined and determined by corporeal factors, by how many degrees tainted they were from that prelapsarian or just pre-miscegenated state the Spanish called limpieza de sangre: blood purity. In promulgating this idea, the Spanish Inquisition became the first institution in world history to treat Judaism primarily as a race, as a sanguinary quantum and heritable trait that could not be lost or abrogated; setting the precedent for subsequent genocidal and quasi-genocidal regimes so numerous and notorious, he said, that I don’t have to name them. And then he named them: Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and the Arab Ummah, the lattermost of which had expelled nearly all of its Jewish population in only the last decade, sending refugees coursing from Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Libya, and Egypt into Israel.”
- “Bibi, Melech Yisroel, his supporters call him, “Bibi, King of Israel.” His reign, marked by the building of walls, the construction of settlements, and the normalization of occupation and state violence against the Palestinians, represents the ultimate triumph of the formerly disgraced Revisionist vision promulgated by his father.”