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.
On Putin, the Jews and the Future of the World
Jews and dictators normally don’t get along. History is replete with examples of strongmen who reviled the Jewish communities in their midst. Many of their names spring easily to mind, like Hitler, Stalin and...
We need to step up the fight against anti-Asian hatred in America
On a recent evening, I was traveling on the New York subway in a car that was empty except for me, a woman and her child, and two men. As I sat down, I...
A ‘Palestine-firster’ scandal comes to the US Congress
During Barack Obama’s presidency, when diplomatic tensions between Israel and the United States sank to rarely seen lows, the term “Israel-Firster” was concocted by the Jewish state’s adversaries as a means of demeaning its...
What the row over caricatures of Yasser Arafat tells us about Palestinian politics
A perennial discussion in the cauldron that is Middle Eastern politics concerns the degree to which a sovereign Palestinian state, should one ever be created, would be democratic.
The democratic character of any state is...
Has the time come to bribe the unvaccinated?
“How can we as a society stand by and watch people die when a simple shot could prevent a life-threatening illness?” That was the agonized question asked by a group of nine health-care providers...
Europe’s Jews have an uncertain future, but a future nonetheless
The continent of Europe ceased to be the center of Jewish life more than a century ago, when it yielded that status to the increasingly affluent, influential Jewish community in the United States, joined,...
Heard again: Cries of ‘Death to the Jews!’ in a Polish city
In her recent co-authored book Philo-Semitic Violence: Poland’s Jewish Past in New Polish Narratives, the Warsaw-based literary scholar Elzbieta Janicka recounts an episode from Poland’s past that sheds a great deal of light on Poland’s...
Rep. Jamaal Bowman’s ‘thought crime’ on Israel and the Palestinians
“Sanction.” “Boycott.” “Cancel.” “Expel.” “Reject.”
These five words encapsulate the methods and approach of the Palestinian solidarity movement in Western countries. Theirs is the politics of snarling censure and immovable doctrine, in which softer notions...
Is Eric Zemmour the new Bruno Kreisky?
Could a politician who positively identifies as Jewish and expresses pro-Israel sympathies ever be elected as head of state in a European country?
The question is still a hypothetical one. In spite of the large...
Iraq persecutes its heretics
It has the air of a witch-hunt. Many of the 300 leaders of Iraqi civil society, Sunni and Shi’a, who gathered in the Kurdish region last week for a conference advocating an Iraqi peace...