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.
Trump, Kim and the ‘good citizen’
One of the many memorable scenes in “The Lives of Others”—an exemplary German movie whose plot centers on the Stasi secret police in the late, unlamented German Democratic Republic—involves the indiscreet telling of a...
Why a soccer hooligan is smiling
Jibril Rajoub is many things—a convicted terrorist, a former West Bank security chief, a former confidante of the late Yasser Arafat, and now the head of both the Palestinian Football Association and the Palestinian...
Behind Erdoğan’s boycott threat against Israel
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is in the midst of one of his periodic bouts of Israel-hatred, lashing out at the Jewish state and its leaders with all the insults (“Nazi,” “apartheid,” “child-killers” and...
‘Trump’s war’ isn’t coming
A few hours after U.S. President Donald Trump announced on May 8 that the United States had exited the Iran nuclear deal, the doyenne of progressive political-action committees, MoveOn.org, sent out a fundraising email...
Time to abandon the ‘original sin’ theory
As welcome as the remarkably diverse condemnations of Mahmoud Abbas’s latest anti-Semitic speech have been over the last few days—with UNESCO’s new director-general, The New York Times, J Street and the German-Palestinian Association all joining the...
The Warsaw Ghetto: The epitome of rightful resistance
It’s hard to say for sure whether the following fable was really told in the Warsaw Ghetto, but it’s grimly funny enough to warrant repeating.
The story goes that at the height of World War...
The left still has a Jewish problem
There is a tragic account of the last moments of Grigori Zinoviev, the veteran Russian Bolshevik leader of Jewish descent who was executed by Stalin in 1936. According to the historian Donald Rayfield, on...
Putin an anti-Semite? It really doesn’t matter
Among Sephardic Jews of my grandmother’s generation, there was a popular, if unproven, belief that Gen. Francisco Franco—the military dictator who ruled Spain from 1939 until his death in 1975—was of Jewish parentage, and...
From Holocaust to ‘Polocaust’: A change in common parlance doesn’t change the facts
I interviewed Mateusz Morawiecki, the prime minister of Poland, during his September visit to New York. The public-relations maven who arranged the meeting pitched Morawiecki—then still deputy prime minister—as a rising star anxious to...
No hate of Halimi? French won’t see anti-Semitism for what it is
Flush from his victory over far-right candidate Marine Le Pen in the French elections last July, President Emmanuel Macron decided to address head on the horrific murder of a Jewish pensioner in Paris three...