Joshua Cohen, the late Winfred Rembert win arts Pulitzers

Joshua Cohen’s “The Netanyahus,” a comic and rigorous campus novel based on the true story of the father of former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seeking a job in academia, has won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction

NEW YORK -- Joshua Cohen's “The Netanyahus,” a comic and rigorous campus novel based on the true story of the father of former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seeking a job in academia, has won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Benzion Netanyahu, who died in 2012, was a medieval historian and ultra-nationalist who taught at several American schools, including the University of Denver and Cornell University. “The Netanyahus” is set around 1959-60 and centers on a Jewish historian at a university loosely based on Cornell who is asked to help decide whether to hire the visiting Israeli scholar. The novel, subtitled “An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family,” has been highly praised for its blend of wit and intellectual debate about Zionism and Jewish identity.

“It is an infuriating, frustrating, pretentious piece of work — and also absorbing, delightful, hilarious, breathtaking and the best and most relevant novel I’ve read in what feels like forever,” The New York Times' Taffy Brodesser-Akner wrote last June.

Many of the winners in the arts Monday were explorations of race and class, in the past and the present. Winners were also announced in several journalism categories.