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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.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
Featured Columnist
A Kurdish campaign to boycott Turkey
All that the Kurds have in common with the Palestinians in this regard is their method. Their moral foundations are radically different.
Nov. 5, 2019
Ben Cohen
A view of a parade float at the Carnival of Aalst in March 2019, featuring two Orthodox Jewish caricatures that were widely condemned as anti-Semitic. Source: Screenshot.
Featured Columnist
Belgium’s carnival of hatred is still going strong
In recent years, organizers have had some fun by conjuring up the most horrendous stereotypes in the form of oversized puppets of Orthodox Jews complete with side curls and hooked noses.
Oct. 28, 2019
Ben Cohen
A neo-Nazi demonstration in Germany in 2008. Source: Screenshot.
Featured Columnist
Germany’s rising far-right threat
If the neo-Nazi gunman in Halle hadn’t been prevented from entering the synagogue by its robust security system, Germany would have been confronted with the most atrocious act of anti-Semitism on its soil since the Nazi era.
Oct. 18, 2019
Ben Cohen
Kurdish Mahabad Republic leader Qazi Muhammad (middle), between 1946 and 1947. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
Featured Columnist
The Americans, the Kurds, the war
In the grand sweep of World War II history, Kurdish national aspirations have been little more than a footnote. With this latest incursion, it may stay that way.
Oct. 11, 2019
Ben Cohen
A photo of a 12-year-old Jewish boy in Australia being bullied to kiss the shoes of a Muslim classmate. Source: Twitter.
Featured Columnist
The sorry tale of two photographs
The goal in both? To lampoon and disgrace those in the offensive images—one adult, the other a child—by way of their Jewishness.
Oct. 4, 2019
Ben Cohen
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Credit: Flickr.
Featured Columnist
In Britain, Boris is opening the door for Jeremy
If the Labour Party leader becomes prime minister, it will unleash a chain reaction of condemnation from British Jews and cause agonized debate over whether Jews have a future in a land where their roots stretch back for more than a millennium.
Sept. 27, 2019
Ben Cohen
Robert Mugabe in 2008. Credit: U.S. Air Force Photo by Tech. Sgt. Jeremy Lock via Wikimedia Commons.
Featured Columnist
Robert Mugabe: Death without justice
That Robert Mugabe died without ever having to answer for his crimes will come as a boost to the world’s remaining tyrannies, from the Islamic Republic of Iran to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.
Sept. 6, 2019
Ben Cohen
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.
July 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?
July 19, 2019
Ben Cohen
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