Joshua Cohen, who won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Netanyahus. Now he wants to buy a publishing house.
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Pulitzer Prize winner Joshua Cohen wants to buy the publishing company Schocken Books, which was founded in New York in 1945. Today he belongs to Bertelsmann, which earned very well under Hitler. A conversation about literature, Jews and the publishing world.
Mister Cohen, how on earth did you get the crazy idea of wanting to buy the Schocken publishing house as a writer? Had you been drinking all night before or just a writer’s block?
Neither of them. It all started with Penguin Random House wanting to make the publishing company more diverse. And Lisa Lucas, who I really like, has been appointed head of a publishing division that Schocken is a part of. She found out that Bertelsmann had no interest in investing in Schocken. Then there was a piece about her in The New York Times Magazine, which hailed her as the new black voice in publishing. It said it’s great that she’s replacing all these old white men. But anyone referred to in the article as an old white man…
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