A New and Different View of Gaza.

Joshua Cohen is a writer who belongs to a group of authors who have used their own backgrounds and experiences to produce brilliant texts describing various aspects of Jewish-American life — I’m thinking of Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, and Saul Bellow in that respect.

Cohen’s latest effort is a story in last week’s issue of The New Yorker which as far as I can tell, is the first attempt to describe in fiction what the situation in Gaza means to American Jews.

The story begins with Cohen deciding that he’s going to move out of New York City and find a quiet, secluded place to write which doesn’t sound like all those sirens as the ambulances roar by on Broadway or smell like the rotten garbage spilling out of those cans which haven’t been emptied out for the previous week.

He winds up in an abandoned summer camp somewhere in the wilds of the New Jersey Pine Barrens (which was also the setting for one of the best episodes of ‘The Sopranos’) and now all he needs is the cash to buy the whole place.

Along comes his cousin who lives in Israel but is always popping up in the States looking for money to invest in yet another scheme which never works out. This time, however, he has flown over from Tel Aviv because he is raising money to buy military helmets which can be worn by Jews living in West Bank settlements to…