Joshua Cohen

National News

Community News

International News

Israel News

Arts & Culture

Fast Forward

The Shmooze

Forward Forum

Editorial

La Mort Que Je Conviens

By Joshua Cohen

Ghérasim Luca was born in 1913 in Bucharest and, as a Jew and intellectuel, spoke Yiddish, Romanian, German and French, the last being the language of his books. A dissolute late adolescence found Luca traveling often through Paris, where he became interested in the movement called Surrealism. He spent the war hiding in Romania, which hated its Jews but occasionally sheltered them, too.Read More

The Christian Soldiers of the Holy City

By Joshua Cohen

They began as a charitable organization, a brotherhood charged with caring for Jerusalem’s indigent pilgrims before the First Crusade. They ended the Crusades as warlords, infamous for their violence and greed. This role reversal would seem to be a staple of American foreign policy, but it is not, or not only that. It is also the history of the Holy City’s Order of the Knights Hospitallers — the subject of a new book by British historian David Nicolle.Read More

Eulogy for a Fading Jewish Wonderland

By Joshua Cohen

There’s a strain of Zionism peculiar to the Q train — that subway line wending its way from Manhattan’s Lower East Side and over the Manhattan Bridge into Brooklyn, through Hasidic Midwood, past the Russians in Brighton Beach, then terminating at Coney Island’s Stillwell Avenue stop, “the largest subway station in the world.”Read More

The Poet Who Invented Himself

By Joshua Cohen

Even to those who have no Hebrew, the name “Yehuda Amichai” might sound like a line of poetry, and poetry, at its best, should communicate through sound alone. But Yehuda is also Hebrew for “Judah,” as in the Lion of Judah, symbol of ancient Israelite military and political strength, and Amichai combines Ami, which means “my nation,” and Chai, meaning “life”: “My nation lives,” the poet is already saying, and he has just been introduced.Read More

Training a Lens on Israel’s Female Soldiers

By Joshua Cohen

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child proclaims that its signatory states “shall take all feasible measures to ensure that persons below the age of 18 do not take a direct part in hostilities and that they are not compulsorily recruited into their armed forces.” But at the attainment of majority at 18, it is thought, one has already known the best of life, and now it is time, if there would be any, to serve in the military and kill people, and also, in America, to consent to marriage and smoke cigarettes, but not to drink alcohol.Read More


 

Most Read Articles