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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.

Miniature showing the expulsion of Jews following the Edict of Expulsion by Edward I of England on July 18, 1290. The yellow badge that Jews were forced to wear can be seen in the illustration. Credit: Scanned from “Four Gothic Kings,” Elizabeth Hallam, ed. via Wikimedia Commons.
Featured Columnist
Emancipation, empathy and America
If we’ve learned anything from the torrid, often ill-informed debates about anti-Semitism over the last year—whether inside or outside our borders—it’s that the hatred of Jews comes in bewildering varieties.
Aug. 30, 2019
Ben Cohen
Hong Kong anti-extradition bill protest in June 2019. Credit: Studio Incendo via Flickr.
Featured Columnist
Why Jews should care about the Hong Kong democracy protests
What should pick at our consciences is the kind of society that China has now become, exactly 70 years after the Communist Party took power—a society created from a legacy of mass murder.
Aug. 16, 2019
Ben Cohen
The Belgian “De Morgen” newspaper, which is now subject to an investigation over publishing an anti-Semitic article.
Featured Columnist
Attacking the ‘chosen’
Zionism and its product—the State of Israel—are transformed from a political movement in favor of Jewish self-determination into an almost mystical evil, with the arrogant idea of “chosenness” driving every decision and every act of its adherents and servants.
Aug. 12, 2019
Ben Cohen
King Felipe VI of Spain (center), accompanied by Catalonia President Carles Puigdemont (left) and Barcelona Mayor Ada Colau, prepare to lay a wreath at the site of a truck-ramming attack two days earlier on La Rambla that left two people dead and more than 100 wounded, Aug. 19, 2017. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
Featured Columnist
An Iranian lie unfolds in the Spanish media
As the old English proverb has it that there are none so blind as those who will not see; the reason the writer of a controversial journalistic series fell for such a poorly executed hoax is that he had already arrived at his conclusions.
Jul. 26, 2019
Ben Cohen
AMIA Building Buenos Aires Argentina Names of Those Killed
Featured Columnist
AMIA 25 years on: Insult, injury and Argentina’s upcoming election
No one, not a single person, has been tried and convicted for their role in Latin America’s worst terrorist atrocity, in which 85 people died and more than 300 were wounded. Will a shift in leadership change that this fall?
Jul. 19, 2019
Ben Cohen
Jeremy Corbyn, former leader of the British Labour Party. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
Featured Columnist
‘Who, me? A racist?’
The British Labour Party offers a weak response to the BBC’s anti-Semitism investigation.
Jul. 12, 2019
Ben Cohen
The Israel Project logo.
Featured Columnist
TIP is dead; long live the Israel Project
For advocates of Israel and Zionism in the public square, there is only one question that matters when it comes to TIP’s demise: Is it a political defeat? My own answer is an unwavering no, it isn’t.
Jul. 8, 2019
Ben Cohen
People participate at the annual Gay Pride Parade in Tel Aviv on June 14, 2019, which marked the end of Pride Week in Tel Aviv, acclaimed as one of the most gay-friendly cities in the world. Photo by Flash90.
Featured Columnist
Arab homophobia and Western indifference
Gay men are driven underground in Muslim countries—Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia—where being outed means facing the ultimate sentence of death by stoning.
Jun. 28, 2019
Ben Cohen
The veteran Spanish journalist and commentator Iñaki Gabilondo. Credit: European Jewish Congress.
Featured Columnist
‘El Poderosísimo lobby Judío:’ A Spanish Obsession
Arguments like Iñaki Gabilondo’s can always find a peg to hang on; when Jews aren’t running the media, they are starting wars in the Middle East, or running the White House, or blasting Zionist propaganda at anyone in their path.
Jun. 14, 2019
Ben Cohen
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. Credit: Kevin Case via Flickr.
Featured Columnist
Remember Marshal Pétain, Bill de Blasio?
In New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s mind, Philippe Pétain is the avatar of a brutal, ultra-conservative, privileged white-male army general—the sort of person to whom anti-Semitism comes “naturally.”
Jun. 7, 2019
Ben Cohen
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo meets with Lebanese Speaker of Parliament Nabih Berri in Beirut on March 22, 2019. Credit: U.S. State Department.
Featured Columnist
Nabih Berri’s grotesque anti-Semitism
For all the sensitivity to race and gender in the last 50 years, we still don’t bat an eyelid when Arab or Muslim leaders come out with same anti-Semitic garbage that has dominated casual discourse about Israel and Jews for at least a century.
May. 31, 2019
Ben Cohen
Stortorget in Malmö, Sweden. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
Featured Columnist
Malmö 2020: World leaders against anti-Semitism
The first potential danger of the 2020 conference is that it will allow a city linked to assaults against Jews to clean up its image without cleaning up its act.
May. 24, 2019
Ben Cohen
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