One of the humiliating incidents involves making Blum portray Santa Claus at the college's Christmas party because “it’ll free up the people who actually celebrate the holiday to enjoy themselves.” Because he is Jewish, Dr. Morse involuntarily appoints Blum to the hiring committee for a Jewish historian by the name of Benzion Netanyahu.

The hiring committee assignment takes an unexpected twist when Benzion arrives for lunch at Blum's residence, not alone but with the unannounced company of his audacious wife and feral three children (Yonatan, Benjamin, and Iddo).

The magazine's critical summary reads: "This unusual academic satire is of a piece with Cohens other fiction: exuberant and virtuosic, if sometimes inaccessible in its esoteric musings".

[3] David Isaacs praised Cohen's wit at the sentence level but questioned his success in conveying a sense of depth, describing the novel in Literary Review as "erudite, occasionally hilarious and eventually unhinged.

[10] The Pulitzer citation for the novel described it as "A mordant, linguistically deft historical novel about the ambiguities of the Jewish-American experience, presenting ideas and disputes as volatile as its tightly-wound plot.