"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 non-fiction, the campus novel with the lecture, The Netanyahus is a wildly inventive, genre-bending comedy of blending, identity, and politics-"An Account of A Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family" that finds Joshua Cohen at the height of his powers"--

The year is 2015, and 21-year-olds Yoav and Uri have just completed their compulsory military service in the Israel Defense Forces. In keeping with national tradition, they take a year off for rest, recovery, and travel. They come to New York City and begin working for Yoav's distant cousin, David King-a proud American patriot, Republican, and Jew, and the recently divorced proprietor of King's Moving Inc., a heavyweight in the Tri-State area's moving and storage industries. What starts off as a profitable if eerily familiar job-an "Occupation"-quickly turns violent, when they encounter one homeowner seeking revenge

Fiction. This brilliant first novel is a portrait of an artist at the end of an art form. The elderly Jewish-Hungarian composer Schneidermann, who survived a musical education, survived the war, survived Europe, survived the neglect of all his music, finally and suddenly vanishes during a movie matinee on the Upper West Side of New York. The novel begins with Schneidermann's friend--his last friend, his only friend--the violin virtuoso Laster, onstage at Carnegie Hall. He has finished playing the first movement of Schneidermann's last composition, his Violin Concerto. At this point he is supposed tobegin his cadenza...his solo. Instead, he drops his instrument and lifts his voice, delivering the text of this novel unto the audience, held captive through night into morning only by the spiel.

Cultural Writing. Essays. Fiction. Jewish Studies. Writer Joshua Cohen and artist Michael Hafftka interpret the twenty-two letters of the "Aleph Bet," the Hebrew alphabet, in this collection of short writings. Through their images and texts, both writer and artist engage these letters, in form and in function, in manners both mundane and mystical: the letter "hey" becomes a hat, or a ritual head-covering; the letter "yod" is said to represent a young girl, etc. Together they formulate a challenge to the Second Commandment, which forbids representation, in a style at once traditional and modern, expressively mindful of what it means to lack faith and yet, in the turn of a phrase, at the stroke of a paintbrush, refusing the consolation of cult.