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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.

Anti-Semitic graffiti equating Judaism with Nazism and money, found in Madrid in 2003. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
Opinion
‘What must be said:’ An enduring anti-Semitic trope
Ilhan Omar is not the first U.S. legislator to have trafficked in this image, which is rooted in the anti-Semitic idea that Jewish power is, by definition, financially driven, tribal in interest and ruthless in the effects that it has upon non-Jews.
Feb. 15, 2019
Ben Cohen
An observant Jewish man seen waiting on the streets in Munich, Germany. May 05, 2018. Credit: Nati Shohat/FLASH90
Featured Columnist
Anti-Semitism and the ‘visible’ Jews
The correct observation that the situation in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y., is an exception, and not the rule, for most American Jews shouldn’t lead us to complacency.
Feb. 1, 2019
Ben Cohen
An observant Jewish man seen waiting on the streets in Munich, Germany. May 05, 2018. Credit: Nati Shohat/FLASH90
Featured Columnist
Behind Europe’s anti-Semitism ‘perception gap’
Disturbing confirmation that opinion in Europe about “the Jews” and their troubles is much more divided than one might have hoped.
Jan. 25, 2019
Ben Cohen
British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. Credit: Sophie J. Brown/Flickr.
Featured Columnist
Know your enemy: Jeremy Corbyn’s Brexit test
From his vantage point, the time between now and the March 29 decision deadline is one hell of a long time—a whole nine weeks, more or less, in which he will be under enormous pressure to declare precisely where he stands.
Jan. 18, 2019
Ben Cohen
Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Credit: The Kremlin.
Featured Columnist
Don’t forget the Maduro regime in Venezuela
In a harbinger of what was to come, under Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s Jewish community of 20,000 shrank to less than 7,000, harassed out of their homeland by the anti-Semitic, “anti-imperialist” rhetoric of a regime that presided over the community’s economic immiseration at the same time.
Jan. 11, 2019
Ben Cohen
U.S. President Donald Trump participates in a Christmas Day video teleconference from the Oval Office on Dec. 25, 2018. Credit: Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead.
Featured Columnist
‘Sand and death,’ or opportunity knocks?
Even if we assume Iran is presently retreating, it’s not going to do so quietly. And once the United States is out of the way, it is quite conceivable that the surge of power that Tehran has enjoyed over the past decade will be reinvigorated.
Jan. 4, 2019
Ben Cohen
The “Hall of Names” commemorating victims of the Holocaust at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Photo: David Shankbone via Wikimedia Commons.
Featured Columnist
How to teach the Holocaust going forward
Is the Holocaust, it is often asked, any more important than other demonstrations of inhumanity in the world? And what of the co-opting of its messages for political purposes?
Dec. 28, 2018
Ben Cohen
Brian Eno, 2006. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
Featured Columnist
Oh, Eno!
He was one of the first serious, recognizable musical artists to endorse BDS, a position he has since maintained with an obsessive dogmatism that it is utterly at odds with his approach to music.
Dec. 14, 2018
Ben Cohen
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, confirmed on April 26, 2018. Credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr.
Featured Columnist
The Pompeo doctrine
The U.S. secretary of state’s remarks were a strange fusion of conservative realism and radical imagineering. For example, there were no calls for “regime change” in either Iran or North Korea, merely toughly worded demands for their existing regimes to reform their behavior internationally.
Dec. 10, 2018
Ben Cohen
French Israelis light memorial candles as they gather at Paris Square in Jerusalem in a demonstration against anti-Semitism in France following the murder of Mireille Knoll, an 85-year-old Jewish woman in Paris, March 28, 2018. Photo by Hadas Parush/Flash90.
Featured Columnist
Silent majority needs encouragement in fight against anti-Semitism
Seven decades after the Holocaust and the creation of the State of Israel, the anti-Semitism that has been shaped since the turn of this century—nearly all of it recycled from previous manifestations of Jew-hatred—is at a new height of confidence.
Nov. 30, 2018
Ben Cohen
Iraqi Yazidi refugees in Newroz camp receive help from International Rescue Committee after fleeing their homes in 2014. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
Opinion
On the Yazidi genocide, a bad day for the Knesset
Given the documented evidence of ISIS crimes against the Yazidis and the specific wording used by the United Nations, to argue that the international body does not consider this to be a genocide is to raise pedantry and diplomatic caution above principle.
Nov. 26, 2018
Ben Cohen
A historic sign at the railway spur in Sobibor. Credit: Jacques Lahitte via Wikimedia Commons.
Featured Columnist
Putin plays with the Holocaust
Russia does not make movies for the sake of art, but for the sake of politics.
Nov. 19, 2018
Ben Cohen
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