The Netanyahus Quotes

“This is what I think of America -- nothing. This is what I think of American Jews -- nothing. Your democracy, your inclusivity, your exceptionalism -- nothing. Your chances for survival -- none at all. You, Ruben Blum, are out of history; you're over and finished; in only a generation or two the memory of who your people were will be dead, and America won't give your unrecognizable descendants anything real with which to replace the sense of peoplehood it took from them; the boredom of your wife--who's tearing her program up into little white paper pills she'd like to swallow like Percodan--isn't merely boredom with you or her work or with the insufficiency of options for educated women in this country; it's more like a sense of having not lived fully in a consequential time; and the craziness of your daughter isn't just the craziness of an adolescent abducted from the city to the country and put under too much pressure to achieve and succeed; it's more like a raging resentment that nothing she can find to do in her life holds any meaning for her and every challenge that's been thrust at her--from what college to choose to what career to have--is small, compared to the challenges that my boys, for example--whom she's been condemned to babysit--will one day have to deal with, such as how to make a new people in a new land forge a living history. Your life here is rich in possessions but poor in spirit, petty and forgettable, with your frigidaires and color TVs, in front of which you can munch your instant supper, laugh at a joke, and choke, realizing that you have traded your birthright away for a bowl of plastic lentils...”
― Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus

“and yet the fact remains that the youth today is more sensitive than ever. I admit I don’t know how to understand this phenomenon and have sought to approach it “economically,” asking the question of whether an increase in sensitivity has brought about a decrease in discrimination, or whether a decrease in discrimination has brought about an increase in sensitivity to when, where, and how it occurs.”
― Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus

“Judy was cruel. She had that smart cruelty to her of someone who’d gotten what she wanted. And she’d gotten it the fairest way, through suffering.”
― Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family

“Ben-Zion Netanyahu . . . Which meant nothing to me, or to anyone . . . not even the surname, which was still a generation from its infamy. At the time, and especially in America, it was unknown. Or beyond unknown: it was foreign, esoteric. An alien name, eons old but also from the future; a name equally from the Bible and the funny papers.”
― Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family

“while her taste was good enough, she had the bad taste to work too hard at it.”
― Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family

“This was the aspect of Dr. Morse I found the most perplexing: the man knew his limitations but wasn’t ashamed of them. He didn’t care. 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. I don’t want to come off like I’m putting him down, though, because Dr. Morse in all his ease, his simplicity and ease, taught me an important lesson.”
― Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family

“Satan, the angel who fell when he failed to get tenure.”
― Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family

“His handwriting was pygmy, and the date wasn’t just written backward but its zero was slashed, as is the practice in Europe, where the women grow out their hair and go without underwear and the children all smoke and drink wine.”
― Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family

“Conventional wisdom makes Andrew Jackson out to be a hick Indian-slayer whose backwoods buddies stormed the capital for his inauguration and trashed the White House, tromping their muddy boots across the damask and vomiting all over the flocked wallpaper. The truth, however, is that Jackson wanted to redecorate the executive mansion, but, lacking the funds, he invited guests he could count on to wreck the place and then in the hungover light of the next morning staggered over to Congress to beg for help with cleaning up the mess and buying new furniture, in a subterfuge reminiscent of Judy’s . . .”
― Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family

“all these farm boys are asking her out. To go pick apples or something. How symbolic.” “I’m sure the apples they’re picking are apples. It’s not symbol season.”
― Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family

“said,”
― Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family

“This is a venerable historical office. You don’t realize this, but it is. Usually inherited, a patrimony. El judío de corte, der Hofjude, the Court Jew. The protected Jew. The useful Jew to keep in your pocket, as a consultant on your taxes. Sometimes an intermediary, sometimes an intercessor. Always balancing competing interests. The Elder of the Judenrat who when the Gestapo says, we need to kill one thousand Jews, he’s the one who picks which one thousand. The shtadlan who when the emperor summons him and says, we need more money for our treasury, he tries to bargain down the price while averting a massacre. A tenuous duty, susceptible to all corruptions. Powerful, but never the most powerful, and only partially trusted by both sides, belonging entirely to neither.”
― Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family

“eisegetical;”
― Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family

“ponton”
― Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family

“chthonic”
― Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family

“His handwriting was pygmy, and the date wasn't just written backward but its zero was slashed, as is the practice in Europe, where the women grow out their hair and go without underwear and the children all smoke and drink wine.”
― Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus

“His handwriting was pygmy, and the date wasn't just written backward but it's zero was slashed, as is the practice in Europe, where the women grow out their hair and go without underwear and the children all smoke and drink wine.”
― Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus

“The history of every people is also a history of its craziness, and the more science becomes a religion, the more religion must pretend to be a science, desperate for all logical explanations.”
― Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus

“May we all be judged by strangers!”
― Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family

“Walter, it’s a suitcase—you don’t put a suitcase on a bed where you sleep. You know how dirty suitcases are?”
― Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family

“that the bulk of his scholarship was out of my grasp); as”
― Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family

“My name is Ruben Blum and I’m an, yes, an historian.

But my front-door was locked and I didn’t have the key, so I knocked, and as I waited for Edith to let me in, I kept waiving the shovel back at the Sheriff and mumbling, “Turks…what did you expect?…just a bunch of crazy Turks…”
― Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus

“it can only be distressing to an honest man to witness the ranks of his distinguished profession being infiltrated by Reds who seek to pervert what must be taken as history’s purpose, which is the reinforcement of our government and political institutions.”
― Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family

“What I’m trying to say, Ruben, is that meeting this horrible man and his horrible wife, it made me realize something. It made me realize I don’t believe in anything anymore and not just that, but I don’t care. I have no beliefs and I’m OK with it; I’m more than OK, I’m glad . . . I’m glad I’m getting older without convictions . . .” “What’s Judy always saying, and her friends? ‘It’s copacetic’?” “It’s copacetic.” She retook my arm and we walked on, a pair of sweethearts in the snow. Our block was totally socked in. Hedgerows of snow. The pearly humps of cars. We shuffled up the steps to our door, where the snow was soft and powdery and, even at the topmost step, under the overhang, calf-high. I think of it as a blessing: may you never lock your door . . . may you never have to lock your door . . . I opened the door and—resisting the impulse to sweep her up like a bride—held it open for Edith. She stepped inside. She crunched onto the mat and bent down to untie her laces but stopped and turned and clung to me. I looked over her shoulder, through the lens fog, and saw our new television cabinet tipped over face-first, its screen shattered, and the youngest Netanyahu boy curled fetal atop a mound of gingerbread house scraps and glass.”
― Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family

“The Spanish Inquisition was founded to provide a way out of this bind, and a justification for converso-oppression. It did so through offering the monarchy a simple redefinition: Judaism had always been defined, and defined itself, primarily as a religion—as a set of tenets, and a set of practices—but the genius of the Spanish Inquisition was to insist it was a race, with the implication that even a convert to Christianity, even a fervent new Christian, was still a Jew at heart, because Judaism inhered in the blood. Once these new Christians were racialized back into a Jewish identity, they could once again be oppressed: they could be exorbitantly taxed; they could have their property and assets seized; and, with the nobility rendered too impotent to protect them, they could be expelled from the country entirely.”
― Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family

“When we were young, we took everything so seriously. Everything we read. Every exhibition and concert and book. All those poems. We were serious people and believed in things. In ideas. So sincere. And the way we talked: ‘ethical aesthetics’ and ‘the moral passions of the culture’… The way we talked about politics: ‘the freedom from fear,’ ‘the freedom from want,’ and how it was honorable to serve your country, and how even being skeptical of your country could be a way of serving it… We were so earnest and principled but so intense, about democracy and love and death, as if we knew what those things were…”
― Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus

“perhaps I should just conclude with the antagonism between the belief that history never repeats itself and the belief that it always repeats itself, in the very circular eternity of this table.”
― Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus

“the antagonism between Jewish messianism, which was political, and Christian messianism, which was religious…”
― Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus

“But I would submit that even messianism, even false messianism, is more Jewish a discipline than history”
― Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus

“They were the first who understood that all that was possible was a truth shared by the dominant people, the group or subgroup or family in power.”
― Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus