Ben Cohen
Ben Cohen writes a weekly column for JNS on Jewish affairs and Middle Eastern politics. His writings have been published in Commentary, the New York Post, Haaretz, The Wall Street Journal and many other publications.
What would Matt Baldacci do? The collaborator mentality returns
Like many Jews of my generation, born during a period when antisemitism was largely depicted as a historical phenomenon and any manifestations were seen as an unfortunate aberration, I would occasionally wonder how the...
Afghanistan and Gaza: Tragedy and farce
Keen-eyed readers of this column will know that I am fond of occasionally quoting Karl Marx’s observation that history repeats itself, “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” In those lines...
Time to huddle: Antisemitism on the field
As unsettling and painful as the current wave of global antisemitism that followed the Oct. 7 Hamas pogrom in Israel is, it’s still important to remember that those bestial atrocities were an episode in,...
‘Israelis Without Borders’
In the wake of the devastating floods earlier this week in Libya, the Palestinian Civil Defense Service, which operates under the auspices of the Palestinian Authority, announced that it was sending a 37-member team...
Antisemitism still haunts the European left
France’s Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin last week ordered the dissolution of a Catholic traditionalist association named “Civitas” following claims of antisemitism against one of its leaders. The individual in question was the essayist Pierre...
Germany’s far-right comes to Yad Vashem
Ever since its foundation in 1953 by an act of the Knesset, Yad Vashem in Jerusalem has served admirably as Israel’s national memorial to the Holocaust. Millions of visitors have passed through its doors,...
The antisemitism that never went away
Antisemitism expresses itself in many forms, but few are as lethal or as persistent as the caricature of the hook-nosed Jew sitting on a pile of cash looking pleased with himself.
This kind of image...
‘The system has failed:’ Antisemitism flourishes in France
Five years ago, an 85-year-old survivor of the Holocaust, Mireille Knoll, was brutally murdered in her apartment in Paris by two intruders, one of whom was a neighbor she had known since his childhood.
Knoll’s murder...
China’s cry for freedom
There is no getting around the fact that we live in dangerous times, defined by the worst military conflict in Europe since the end of World War II and a global economic downturn.
Equally, there...
Mr. Putin goes to Tehran
Despite spending five months baiting Ukraine’s leaders as “neo-Nazis,” among them the country’s Jewish President Volodymyr Zelensky, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin didn’t bat an eyelid as he embraced a genuine Nazi sympathizer and Holocaust...