New York Times Correspondent Roger Cohen asks how close has Israel conformed to its founding ideals, in his talk “Israeli Spring? The Enduring Jewish Question,” at 6 p.m. Feb. 6 at the Michigan Union Rogel Ballroom.
Cohen says that 63 years after its founding, Israel was supposed to create what David Ben-Gurion called “a self-sufficient people, master of its own fate,” rather than one “hung up in midair.”
Photo courtesy Roger Cohen.
“After the millennia of marginalization, after the pits in the Lithuanian forests and Auschwitz and Dachau, it was supposed to end Jewish precariousness, Jewish annihilation angst,” Cohen continues, “Know your history, be proud of your history, end Jewish meekness and humiliation, the acquiescence that took your forbears to the ditches and the gas: that was Israel’s message.” The lesson of strength, coupled with that of tolerance declared in the Founding Charter of 1948, will be discussed.
Cohen joined The New York Times in 1990. He was a foreign correspondent for more than a decade before becoming acting foreign editor on Sept. 11, 2001, and foreign editor six months later. Since 2004, he has written a column for The Times-owned International Herald Tribune, first for the news pages and since 2007 for the op-ed page. In 2009 he was named a columnist of The New York Times.
Cohen has written “Hearts Grown Brutal: Sagas of Sarajevo,” an account of the wars of Yugoslavia’s destruction, and “Soldiers and Slaves: American POWs Trapped by the Nazis’ Final Gamble.” He also has co-written a biography of General Norman Schwarzkopf, “In the Eye of the Storm.”
The talk is part of a two-day symposium on “Israel Today,” organized by Sarai Aharoni, the Schusterman Visiting Lecturer. For more information, email [email protected] or go to www.lsa.umich.edu/judaic/.
