Roger Cohen

Award-winning journalist and author Roger Cohen meets Fifth Estate host Sally Warhaft for a wide-ranging spotlight conversation on his memoir, his body of work and his perspective on international affairs.

Cohen has worked from 15 different countries as a foreign correspondent, reporting for some of the most prestigious news outlets in the globe. His association with the New York Times has spanned 25 years – as a foreign correspondent, foreign editor, and now as an op-ed columnist. Of his trade, he’s said: ‘The journalist moves in the opposite direction from the crowd, toward danger, often leaving the settled majority perplexed.’

In the latest of Cohen’s four books – 2015’s The Girl from Human Street: Ghosts of Memory in a Jewish Family – he turns that reporting ethos to his own family’s complex and itinerant history, centring on his mother’s travails with mental illness, geographical displacement and loneliness. It’s a slow-burning account of love, revealed layer by layer; it’s also an intergenerational search for the meaning of Cohen’s complex inheritance, and for ‘Jewishness’, touching on his sometimes controversial views on key issues facing modern Israel.

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