Lectures Topics

Cohen has spoken at a range of institutions, from New York's Center for Jewish History to Indiana University to the Jewish Community Library of Los Angeles.

Please take a look at his list of appearances and some words of praise.

Lectures: Sephardic

Long Live the King: Women in Power in Sephardic Folktales. From Ulysses to James Bond, we love a hero with a trick up his sleeve. Nearly always, it is a role reserved for men. But in these three Sephardic tales, it is the women who get to do the lying, the spying, and the double-crossing.

How the West Won: Teaching French to Spanish Jews. Fights about Jewish education are fights about the Jewish future, and those fights have sometimes been ruthless. In the mid-19th century, Western reformers met Sephardic traditionalists for a showdown in the Ottoman Balkans.

What Can We Learn From this Story? A Personal History Lesson. Cohen's research into his grandmother's Sephardic community led him to the source of some unfortunate personal traits, and taught him that the burdens of history are sometimes offset by its consolations.

Lectures: Jewish culture

Missing a Beat: The Overlooked Contribution of Seymour Krim. The once-celebrated, unhappily Jewish, and self-proclaimed failure Seymour Krim has been left out of recent Beat anthologies, though in 1960 he edited one of the best and was included in others. For more than 20 years he wrote angrily, insightfully, and outrageously about Jewish identity. He died in 1989, but his work hasn't aged a bit.

My Fair Sadie: Allan Sherman and the (Jewish) American Musical "We've got Great Neck men/We've got Scarsdale men/And just lately we've been sneaking into Darien" (to the tune of "On the Street Where You Live"). Sherman's parodies of Broadway hits were the first to point out the Jewish contribution to the American musical.

Zelig and his Friends: The Giants of Jewish Assimilation. Zelig the chameleon man may have been a Woody Allen creation, but he had real-life cousins. Many changed their names, religion, and languages, illuminating a time in Jewish history when the goal was to be invisible.