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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.

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.
July 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.
July 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.
June 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.
June 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.”
June 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
Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the British Labour Party, with Parliament member Andrew Gwynne. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
Featured Columnist
What’s behind Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘Trump Brexit’ warning?
This phrase is indeed catchy and plays well with those sections of British society on left and right who think that the U.S. president, in common with all his predecessors, is itching for a pretext to launch a new World War.
May 17, 2019
Ben Cohen
Blue and White co-chairman Yair Lapid, at the Knesset, during the opening session of the new Knesset, following elections, on April 30, 2019. Credit: Noam Revkin Fenton/Flash90.
Featured Columnist
Polish anti-Semitism is serious, but Yair Lapid is overreaching
Why are the Poles guiltier for witnessing Jewish victims arrive at concentration camps than are the Dutch or Greeks who watched them being dragged out of their homes to get there?
May 10, 2019
Ben Cohen
Leaders from the Polish, Catholic and Jewish communities have denounced an anti-Semitic ritual on Good Friday in the small southeastern Polish town of Pruchnik, where residents hanged, burned and beat a dummy of the apostle Judas, stereotypically described as a Jew. Credit: Screenshot.
Featured Columnist
In the flames consuming a ‘Judas’ effigy in Poland, a deadly trope persists
There was nothing benevolent about it, with its hooked nose, its sidelocks, its wide-brimmed hat, and the words “Traitor” and “Judas 2019” scrawled in black ink across its misshapen, straw-filled body.
April 25, 2019
Ben Cohen
Pharaoh Merneptah.
Featured Columnist
The Pharaoh who spoke too soon
In the week that Jews celebrate Pesach, there is something particularly resonant about an Egyptian Pharaoh’s claim to have successfully carried out what these days would be called a genocide.
April 19, 2019
Ben Cohen
Julian Assange. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
Featured Columnist
Assange’s anti-Semitism revisited
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has spoken about Jews several times, with plain and heartfelt hostility. What most agitates him about Jews is their notorious practice of smearing critics as “anti-Semites” and their penetration of the establishment.
April 13, 2019
Ben Cohen
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