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Ben Cohen. Credit: Courtesy.

Ben Cohen

Featured Columnist

Ben Cohen is a senior analyst with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) and director of FDD’s rapid response outreach, specializing in global antisemitism, anti-Zionism and Middle East/European Union relations. A London-born journalist with 30 years of experience, he previously worked for BBC World and has contributed to Commentary, The Wall Street Journal, Tablet and Congressional Quarterly. He was a senior correspondent at The Algemeiner for more than a decade and is a weekly columnist for JNS. Cohen has reported from conflict zones worldwide and held leadership roles at the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee. His books include Some of My Best Friends: A Journey Through 21st Century Antisemitism.

An illustration of the future. Credit: Shutterstock/atk work.
Featured Columnist
2021: Past, present and future
We cannot prevent the cycles of history from returning to batter us with the same discredited tropes, but we can prepare ourselves more astutely.
Dec. 17, 2021
Ben Cohen
Deutsche Welle in Bonn, 2014. Credit: Christian Wolf via Wikimedia Commons.
Featured Columnist
The perils of broadcasting in Arabic
Staff members need to be trained in how to identify both anti-Semitism and the anti-Zionism that targets Israel’s right to exist in order to exclude these perspectives from their programming.
Dec. 10, 2021
Ben Cohen
Ḗric Zemmour (left). Credit: Facebook/Ḗric Zemmour.
Featured Columnist
Éric Zemmour, presidential candidate
Of all the issues that will be fought over in the forthcoming election, immigration and the broader question of French national identity are likely to be the most bitter.
Dec. 3, 2021
Ben Cohen
An Orthodox Jewish man outside a synagogue in the Jewish Quarter in Antwerp, Belgium, on Dec. 9, 2014. Photo by Johanna Geron/Flash90.
Featured Columnist
Europe’s Jews have an uncertain future, but a future nonetheless
A combination of optimism and defiance displayed by the continent’s Jewish professionals should be welcomed by all.
Nov. 26, 2021
Ben Cohen
Polish President Andrzej Duda. Credit: Grabowski Foto/Shutterstock.
Featured Columnist
Heard again: Cries of ‘Death to the Jews!’ in a Polish city
President Andrzej Duda likening the demonstrators’ actions in Kalisz to “treason,” and several members of parliament expressed an almost physical disgust. It’s clear that these far-right nationalists do not speak for the majority of Polish citizens.
Nov. 19, 2021
Ben Cohen
At center-front: Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), along with other members of U.S. Congress, meet with Palestinian children in Hebron as part of a delegation organized by J Street, Nov. 10, 2021. Source: Jamaal Bowman/Twitter.
Featured Columnist
Rep. Jamaal Bowman’s ‘thought crime’ on Israel and the Palestinians
He and other left-wing activists are being told it’s not enough to support Palestinians by advocating their right to self-determination. Solidarity is only worthy if it presents them as colonized subjects of an apartheid regime that has no right to exist.
Nov. 12, 2021
Ben Cohen
Marchers honor the memory of Holocaust survivor Mireille Knoll, 85, who was murdered in March 2018 in an anti-Semitic attack. Credit: European Jewish Press.
Featured Columnist
The Mireille Knoll murder trial: Will France deliver justice this time?
Even if it does, it won’t be forgotten that it took place in the shadow of the violent anti-Semitic murder of another Jewish woman, Sarah Halimi, who killer was set free.
Nov. 5, 2021
Ben Cohen
Synagogue in Halle, Germany
Featured Columnist
German anti-Semitism, real and perceived
If it turns out that accusations by singer Gil Ofarim aren’t as he says, then it will be a gift to those who believe that anti-Semitism is just a cynical means for Jews to morally blackmail non-Jews.
Oct. 22, 2021
Ben Cohen
Éric Zemmour, French political journalist, writer, essayist, columnist and polemicist, in Nice, in the south of France, to promote his latest book. Credit: Macri Roland/Shutterstock.
Featured Columnist
Is Éric Zemmour the new Bruno Kreisky?
When it comes to anti-Semitic barbs and dog whistles, the overlaps between the two men who denounced their Jewish identity are again all too apparent.
Oct. 15, 2021
Ben Cohen
An Orthodox Jewish man outside a synagogue in the Jewish Quarter in Antwerp, Belgium, on Dec. 9, 2014. Photo by Johanna Geron/Flash90.
Featured Columnist
Can Jewish life in Europe start ‘thriving again’?
Anything that dents the appeal of Jew-hatred in the public imagination is to be welcomed; however, no national government or transnational body can exercise full control over a free society.
Oct. 8, 2021
Ben Cohen
A conference in Erbil, Iraq, hosted by the Center for Peace Communications, September 2021. Source: Screenshot.
Featured Columnist
Iraq persecutes its heretics
The lot of political dissidents has always been a brutal one, and so there is every reason to fear that a combination of arrests and propaganda will be unleashed to crush the nascent movement for peace with Israel.
Oct. 1, 2021
Ben Cohen
Orthodox Jews examine etrogs for imperfections in the northern Israeli city of Tzfat, on Sept. 19, 2021, ahead of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. Photo by David Cohen/Flash90.
Featured Columnist
On visible and invisible Jews
We all know that raw prejudice among Jews against those who are visibly Jewish—that they are loud, rude, unwashed, contemptuous towards outsiders and all the rest of that baggage—is our community’s dirty secret.
Sept. 24, 2021
Ben Cohen
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