On Christmas Eve 1999, all the Jews in the world die in a strange, millennial plague, with the exception of the firstborn males, who are soon adopted by a cabal of powerful people in the American government.
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On Christmas Eve 1999, all the Jews in the world die in a strange, millennial plague, with the exception of the firstborn males, who are soon adopted by a cabal of powerful people in the American government. By the following Passover, however, only one is still alive: Benjamin Israelien; a kindly, innocent, ignorant man-child. As he finds himself transformed into an international superstar, Jewishness becomes all the rage: matzo-ball soup is in every bowl, sidelocks are hip; and the only truly Jewish Jew left is increasingly stigmatized for not being religious. Since his very existence exposes the illegitimacy of the newly converted, Israelien becomes the object of a worldwide hunt...
Meanwhile, in the not-too-distant future of our own, "real" world, another last Jew—the last living Holocaust survivor—sits alone in a snowbound Manhattan, providing a final melancholy witness to his experiences in the form of the punch lines to half-remembered jokes.
Joshua Cohen, born in 1980 in Somers Point, NJ, is one of the most ambitious young novelists in English. Witz is his fourth novel; he's also written four collections of stories, a book-length essay called Attention! (2013), and extensive criticism for Harper's, The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, The Believer, The London Review of Books, and The Jewish Daily Forward. He received a 2012 Pushcart Prize and the 2013 Matanel Prize in Jewish Literature.