Joshua cohen author biography samples

So that, to me, that's sort of the role. That wouldn't have been something brought up by an administrator at an upstate college. I am not as much of an expert as I should be on exactly all the currents that lead you to the place where we are now, but it is such a stark contrast that now that's the only thing that gets talked about on campus.

But also, when you say in the book it's the Israeli that's bringing up the Palestinians, today, you have this world where Good luck finding an Israeli who wants to talk to you about Palestinians at all. It's become this complete … Not just verboten, it's almost like it doesn't … It's the Big Other obviously, it's always there. What was interesting was that I kept trying to talk to Israelis about the Palestinians and the conflict and nobody wanted to talk about it.

And not only that, not only did they not want to talk about it, they thought I was just some dumb rube for wanting to discuss it. Not my political views. I wasn't even expressing any political views. I was there as a journalist. But they joshua cohen author biography samples rolling their eyes like, "Ok, another fucking American wants to talk about Palestinians.

We just sort of stopped having these discussions. For a lot of people, yeah, Netanyahu, Bibi Netanyahu has taken the place of the Palestinians in the domestic discussion. And so he's kind of like the synecdoche or mnemonic device for discussing it. One of the things that I was really thinking about is, now Netanyahu has become the longest-serving prime minister in the history of his country and there's a way in which I think, from reading history, that so much of history is a collapsing of small acts or small events that essentially accrue to different people's spiritual ledgers, let's say.

And in a lot of ways, Netanyahu has become this magnet for all thoughts of Israel's ultimate success and all thoughts of Israel's ultimate failure. Economic powerhouse. And on the other hand, more than ever, an apartheid state. And I think it's the idea that this is the choice that really expresses the extremities of emotions that Israelis feel with Netanyahu.

So to talk about Netanyahu, to get Carveresque about it, what we talk about when we talk about Netanyahu is we talk about Palestine. And so in a way, I found in my own reporting over there, when I've done that, the way to get people to talk about the situation, as they call it, is to bring up Netanyahu. Because there you have the entire history after the entire Second Intifada.

And the whole history of Israel in some ways. Did you read the Anshel Pfeffer bio of Bibi? Or at least one of the many arcs of the country. Yeah, sure, but one of his own personal arcs was trying to convince people that he wasn't American. That he was really Israeli. And, not only that, but that he was almost a non-Ashkenazi Israeli.

I mean, the degree to which he attempted to kind of pervert his own sense of identity and also rewrite it, not just for public consumption, but for himself. And to rewrite his father's place in the country's history and the way that he was almost forced — and in this sense I have sympathy for him — forced to trade on his brother's legacy. All that.

All of that really speaks to a person who is very adept at self-preservation. But to the point where he loses a core. And really, I wanted to read him in the same way that I think Trump can be read in a certain way. As this sort of son, as an eternal son, of a father for whom nothing was good enough. But beyond that, had put himself in a politically untenable position.

And look, during the two most important events of Jewish history of the last half millennium, which is the foundation state of Israel in '48 and the Holocaust, Benzion Netanyahu is not in a concentration camp in Poland, nor was he in Palestine fighting. He was in suburban Philadelphia. It was that total sense of being out of history and the rage occasioned within him.

It's not exactly like the classic thing of a dictator often coming from the imperial periphery, but it's not wildly dissimilar. Yeah, I think for this, it's that feeling of, his father comes from Poland, but really has a headstart on a lot of academics, at least who begin coming into Hebrew University in the '20s and '30s, when it was founded.

And he's a person who speaks better Hebrew, reads better Hebrew, is much more acclimated to this new country, but every year, the best faculties of Europe kind of stream in and he finds himself farther and farther away from his goal of just getting a decent academic appointment there. In a way, it's this interesting thing that we have here. The immigrants are taking away all the jobs.

But it's different when But the truth is, that nationalist feeling was the same. And the nationalist feeling was the same and really in order to deal with that resentment, with that pure, pure resentment and that sense of entitlement, his ideology, his editorializing, and his polemics became more and more severe to the point where he essentially faced the choice to become a terrorist.

And so, what I joshua cohen author biography samples of enjoyed was joshua cohen author biography samples a person like that into an academic setting. Especially a person who's an expert on the Inquisition, in a setting of interrogation by a university interview department. I mean, when these guys are talking about Bolsheviks, he's essentially saying, "No, I've met real Bolsheviks.

Real Bolsheviks. People who've killed people. There were people on the streets. Someone who's ready to say, "Yes, we will spill blood for this. We're ready for this. I haven't actually read Benzion's work. What do you make of Benzion's actual work on the Inquisition? I mean, I think it's … from how I can evaluate it, I can really only go on whatever people in the field kind of think.

Sure, but it's more than I know, so what do you think? I think that he's seen as a very, very eccentric figure. I mean, he knows how to persuade. He is a great, great polemicist. I think that he martials a huge amount of facts to reach these preordained conclusions. And the sheer doggedness in which he pursues a lot of these associations or links in his research — talking about blood libels one moment, talking about the inquisition tribunals, and other moment, talking about the relationships between the monarchy and the nobility, between the nobility and the peasant class, his almost repurposing of Marxist political analysis for opposite — is all masterful.

I think, at the end of the day, he was trying to come up with a historical justification for an ethno-nation-state. I think there's something that I find poignant about someone who needs to really manufacture an intellectual basis for something like this. Certainly, the people who were fighting on the front lines weren't so concerned with having an intellectual justification for their efforts.

But this was a person who was not acting out of total desperation in terms of, he wasn't fighting for survival. He was someone who knew he had the leisure to create the intellectual justification for those fighting for survival. And as Pfeffer says — I was just going through the biography and pulling out some quotes there — in the space Benzion occupied outside the Zionist mainstream, Bibi Netanyahu's Israel was built.

It's emphasizing this idea that he couldn't be a part of the front lines because, in a lot of ways, Benzion was geographically and ideologically marginalized. So of course you can retreat to intellectualism. There's a gift that's hard for people to see as a gift. There's a gift given to certain writers, especially when they're left out of history.

Because it certainly feels like a death sentence, I think, but what they're being given is an opportunity in which they can … They're given a neglected corner in which to write. And they're also given an anger, or an opportunity for anger, or to repurpose their anger and resentment into a goad toward writing. Anger becomes the goad — if not the subject, too.

I think they're constantly seeing people doing things from a periphery. To throw a question back to you is, what's interesting to me is, on one hand, we have an intellectual who is putting together what he considers to be an airtight case for the necessity of a Jewish nation-state. But it's attempting to use facts to justify something entirely fantastical, almost.

And then you have you writing about people who write comic books, who are creating these fantasies of triumphalism or victory, let's say, out of positions of weakness or at least perceived cultural outsiderness. And I was wondering, do you feel like these projects of imagining immense strength or laying the groundwork for immense strength [in superhero comics], are somehow related?

Certainly that's what a lot of the Chabonites would say. But if I understand what you're asking: Certainly, the outsiderness of the Jewish population that was making these comics informs the power fantasies that they're putting in there, but I always get nervous about being too on that. I wrote an essay for Jewish Currents a few weeks ago, pegged to the book, about resisting the urge for the Secret Jewish History.

I do think you have people, especially like Jack Kirby, who grew up at the margins of American society as a poor Jew, growing up in Jewish street gangs, going and fighting, et cetera, and that certainly informs the way in which you craft — I would imagine — you craft a character that is imagined to be extremely powerful. If tortured and neurotic.

But still powerful. Is that what you were getting at? Or is there something else? Yeah, I was really getting at this idea of triumphalism. I don't really know what else to call it. There are all these Jews who are these kind of court Jews who are very powerful merchants and tax farmers for the nobility, but they're essentially, they're the duke whisperers, they're the baron whisperers, they're the Kissingers of the Middle Ages.

There was almost a Kabbalistic kind of idea of the heavens being political or being governmental. It was almost like a large bureaucracy of angels and that you would appeal to these angels that would have higher angels who themselves would have higher angels or higher incarnations of the same angelic presence until finally you approach the Unapproachable.

And what's interested me, is when someone invents a bureaucracy of angels, it's because God itself is too far away, is too inaccessible, so you have to imagine some intermediary figure. Like a miracle, essentially. And I'm wondering why you think that there seems to be something in the Jewish imagination that always does kind of lead to the supernatural or the miraculous as opposed to a vision of a better realism.

I'm talking about something like Yiddish literature, like Singer. If I'm going to theorize off into the ether, perhaps it gets back at this idea of Jewish events. Even if we're not thinking about them as necessarily historical study, the resuscitation of Jewish events always has — not always, but largely — has some degree of intercession from God, from the divine.

There's always some way in which, going back to the Tanakh, you have, in the course of human events, there's always a god there. It's one of the reasons why Hegel and Marx were so appealing for a lot of Jews. It's this idea of, like you say, the intervention. That there are moments when the world breaks, or is made new, or is whatever, and those are contingent upon divine intervention.

And whether that intervention is on a small level with just a human life or life of the people, there are those moments, and you can say that maybe that's what's going on with a lot of the '60s Marvel comics. You have these traumatic events that involve, basically, magic. I mean, gamma radiation, cosmic rays — these are all just made-up things that are stand ins, maybe, for the idea of God intervening in history.

There are certainly later comics that have been explored there. There's currently an Incredible Hulk comic that has dealt with Kabbalah in an interesting way that I don't quite know whether I don't understand it, or it hasn't fully been explained yet. But people do mess with this idea of, maybe the creation of these superheroes, in their fictional universes, is something akin to the intervention of God.

I don't know, that was a lot of rant and theorizing.

Joshua cohen author biography samples

Quotes by Joshua Cohen? Quotes are added by the Goodreads community and are not verified by Goodreads. Learn more. See all Joshua Cohen's quotes ». What will be our July Open Pick? Remember, if you vote for a book and it wins, you are implicitly promising to read the book and participate in the discussion. The poll will be up until the end of May.

The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma. The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen. Bibliography [ edit ]. Novels [ edit ]. Collections [ edit ]. Stories [ edit ]. External links [ edit ]. Wikimedia Commons has media related to Joshua Cohen writer. References [ edit ]. Accessed January 23, Cohen, who grew up in Linwood and spent lots of summers in Cape May, has written a new novel, Witz.

Not bad bookish company for a kid who grew up in Linwood and Cape May, went to the old Trocki Hebrew Academy in Margate and then to Mainland Regional High School, and who worked some summers at his uncle's docks across the bay from Cape May - when he wasn't being a slot cashier at a few Atlantic City casinos or a semi-professional guitar player at gigs around Ocean City, Ventnor and more local spots.

The New York Times. Retrieved 4 July Retrieved Granta Spring The New Yorker. When kings fall, queens rise. About Discuss. She was only eleven-and-a-half inches tall, but she would change the world. Journey through the pages of this heartwarming novel, where hope, friendship and second chances are written in the margins. Book Club Giveaway! Read the Reviews.