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A nonprofit, independent news source to inform, inspire, educate and connect the St. Louis Jewish community.

St. Louis Jewish Light

A nonprofit, independent news source to inform, inspire, educate and connect the St. Louis Jewish community.

St. Louis Jewish Light

A nonprofit, independent news source to inform, inspire, educate and connect the St. Louis Jewish community.

St. Louis Jewish Light

Ben Cohen is a New York City-based journalist and author who writes a weekly column on Jewish and international affairs for JNS. 

25 years after the AMIA bombing, justice is again denied

By Ben CohenPublished March 7, 2019

This July, Argentina’s Jewish community will mark the 25th anniversary of the bombing of the AMIA Jewish Center in Buenos Aires, in which 85 people were murdered and hundreds more were seriously wounded. It is promising to be a wretched and depressing...

Ben Cohen

Abbas, Netanyahu UN speeches signal that 30-year peace process is now dead

By Ben CohenPublished October 4, 2018

There was one corner of New York City last Thursday where the Senate Judicial Committee hearings into the accusations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh went largely unnoticed: the United Nations building perched on the East River, site of...

Ben Cohen writes a weekly column for JNS.org on Jewish affairs and Middle Eastern politics.  The senior editor of  The Tower Magazine and TheTower.org, Cohen is the author of “Some of My Best Friends: A Journey Through Twenty-First Century Antisemitism.”

Netanyahu’s Russian realism

By Ben CohenPublished June 29, 2016

These are the days that Vladimir Putin has been aching for since the end of the Cold War. On Dec. 5, 1989, three weeks after the Berlin Wall was torn down, angry crowds stormed the Dresden Headquarters of the Stasi, the brutal secret police of the Soviet...

A monument in Ramat Gan, Israel, serves as a memorial for the Iraqi Jews killed during the Farhud (Arabic for ‘violent dispossession’) in June 1941.  Photo: PikiWiki Israel

Remembering pogrom against Iraqi Jews, 75 years later

By Ben CohenPublished June 8, 2016

Every Iraqi Jew has a tale to tell about the Farhud, the two-day pogrom that befell the Jews of Baghdad 75 years ago in June 1941. In the case of my own family, it was a matter of heeding the advice of a Muslim business colleague of my grandfather, who...

Professor is latest victim of anti-Israel thought police

By Ben CohenPublished April 22, 2015

Every time I learn about the latest antics of the anti-Israel thought police on university campuses, I find myself offering silent thanks that they are, for the moment, just thought police. Because if these kids and their faculty supporters ran a real...

Ben Cohen is the Shillman Analyst for JNS.org. His writings on Jewish affairs and Middle Eastern politics have been published in Commentary, the New York Post and Ha’aretz. His book, “Some Of My Best Friends: A Journey Through Twenty-First Century Antisemitism” (Edition Critic, 2014), is now available through Amazon. Op-Ed distributed by JNS.org.

Why the Kurds are a beacon of hope in the Middle East

By Ben CohenPublished June 18, 2014

During the war in Iraq, when I was still living in London and coordinating news coverage of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein for various international media organizations, I was in regular contact with a brave Iraqi Kurdish journalist named Ayub Nuri....

Ben Cohen

Should Jews support a boycott of Vladimir Putin-led Russia?

By Ben CohenPublished August 14, 2013

One of the oft-repeated criticisms of the movement to boycott Israel is that it portrays the Middle East’s only healthy democracy as the ultimate rogue state, ignoring at the same time those authoritarian regimes that violate the most basic human rights...

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