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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.

Chinese President Xi Jinping with Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in 2016. Photo: Official Khamenei website via Wikimedia Commons.
Featured Columnist
Lies, transparency and pandemics
When authoritarian regimes lie to their own people about a worldwide, contagious disease, their lies have an impact on those of us who are otherwise mercifully spared from living under their direct jurisdiction.
Mar. 20, 2020
Ben Cohen
The logo of the "Africa for Palestine" group, formerly BDS South Africa. Source: Twitter.
Featured Columnist
‘Rebranding’ BDS on the African continent
BDS South Africa’s shameful misrepresentation of Nelson Mandela as a militant anti-Zionist is simply one aspect of its broader campaign of defamation, in which no inaccuracy, half-truth or outright lie is too wild if it helps with the demonization of Israel and Zionism.
Mar. 13, 2020
Ben Cohen
Black Death, Jews
Featured Columnist
What has changed since the ‘Black Death’?
It’s hard not to notice the conjunction of a viral epidemic that is itself drowning in false information and malicious speculation with a wider context in which political, racial and religious extremism is flourishing.
Mar. 9, 2020
Ben Cohen
Pope Francis arrives to pray in front of the Western Wall, Judaism's holiest site, in Jerusalem's Old City, on May 26, 2014. Photo by Nati Shohat/FLASH90
Featured Columnist
The Vatican opens its wartime archive
For many in the Jewish world, it will be a seminal moment in the relationship between Catholics and Jews since the Second Vatican Council of 1965 famously exonerated the Jewish people of the charge of “deicide”—collective, eternal responsibility for the suffering and death of Jesus.
Feb. 28, 2020
Ben Cohen
Capt. Alfred Dreyfus being stripped of rank in the French military (“Le traître : Dégradation d’Alfred Dreyfus”), on Jan. 13, 1895. Credit: Henri Meyer, National Library of France (Bibliothèque Nationale de France).
Featured Columnist
J’Accuse! Our Dreyfus and theirs
Whatever WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange might be, he is no Dreyfus.
Feb. 24, 2020
Ben Cohen
U.N. Human Rights Council
Featured Columnist
Breaking down the UNHRC blacklist
The fact the overwhelming majority of the companies are Israeli indicates that there is a more sinister aim at work here.
Feb. 12, 2020
Ben Cohen
A view of the anti-Semitic German engraving known as “Judensau” on the Wittenberg Parish Church in Germany. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
Featured Columnist
What should be done with the ‘Judensau’?
One suggestion is to place the offensive carving in a museum. Yet that doesn’t mean the scheme behind it becomes a relic.
Feb. 10, 2020
Ben Cohen
Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks during the Fifth World Holocaust Forum at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial museum in Jerusalem on Jan. 23, 2020. Photo by Yonatan Sindel/Flash90.
Featured Columnist
What Putin didn’t talk about in Jerusalem …
Soviet propaganda claimed that the Zionist movement was an ideological bedfellow of the Nazis, and that Zionist leaders had collaborated with the Nazis at just the time that the USSR was engaged in its heroic resistance.
Jan. 27, 2020
Ben Cohen
Protests at Amir Kabir University in Tehran against the government and its leaders after Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 was shot down on Jan. 8, 2020, killing all 176 passengers on board. Photo by Mohsen Abolghasem via Wikimedia Commons.
Featured Columnist
How solidarity with Palestine inspires resistance in Iran
Protesters are rejecting the basic principles and worldview of the Islamic Republic; they are again proving that the people of Iran should not be confused with the Islamic Republic that rules them.
Jan. 20, 2020
Ben Cohen
A rally in Jerusalem held in solidarity with Jews in the Diaspora following a wave of anti-Semitic attacks. Jan. 5, 2020. Photo by Hadas Parush/Flash90.
Featured Columnist
Blaming anti-Semitism on capitalism
Some on the left are acknowledging that the hatred of Jews is a disturbing reality within our society, and not some ideologically contrived phantom.
Jan. 13, 2020
Ben Cohen
New York City Jewish Solidarity March
Featured Columnist
The multiple faces of anti-Semitism
For all their insistence that anti-Semitism is one thing and anti-Zionism something else entirely, however, on the streets of European and American cities, the two work hand-in-glove.
Jan. 5, 2020
Ben Cohen
Sarah Halimi. Credit: Confédération des Juifs de France et des amis d'Israël.
Featured Columnist
‘Dark days are coming back’: Justice is denied for Sarah Halimi
What we are being told is that there is one standard for French Jews, and another, higher standard for everyone else.
Dec. 20, 2019
Ben Cohen
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