Roger Cohen

Roger Cohen is an English-born American journalist, author, and columnist for The New York Times, where he has worked since 1990 in capacities including foreign correspondent, foreign editor from 2001 to 2004, Op-Ed columnist, and current Paris bureau chief. Educated with master's degrees in history and French from Oxford University, Cohen has reported from over a dozen countries across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, focusing on international conflicts, diplomacy, and political transformations. His contributions to The New York Times have been part of award-winning teams, including the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting on the Ukraine war and George Polk Awards for Ukraine coverage, as well as Pulitzer-recognized post-9/11 foreign desk oversight. Cohen has authored five books, notably The Girl from Human Street: Ghosts of Memory in a Jewish Family, a memoir tracing his Jewish heritage across generations and continents, and Hearts Grown Brutal: Sagas of Sarajevo, chronicling the Yugoslav wars. While praised for insightful global analysis, his opinion pieces on Iran, Israel, and Zionism have drawn criticism from both pro-Israel advocates, who accused him of undue sympathy toward Tehran, and Palestinian rights supporters, who labeled him a defender of Israeli policies.

Roger Cohen was born in London, England, in 1955 to South African Jewish parents, Sydney and June Cohen. His father, a physician born in Johannesburg in 1921, specialized in chemical pathology and emigrated from South Africa to England in the mid-1950s, later serving as a professor at Guy's Hospital Medical School and earning recognition for research on malaria immunity. His mother, raised in South Africa amid a prosperous Jewish community, grappled with severe depression, receiving electroshock therapy when Cohen was three years old in 1958; this condition persisted untreated for decades, profoundly shaping family dynamics. The Cohens' ancestry traced to Lithuanian Jews who fled the Pale of Settlement for South Africa during the 1890s gold rush, establishing comfortable lives under apartheid while evading the Holocaust through pre-Nazi emigration.

The family relocated to South Africa shortly after Cohen's birth, residing there for two years before returning to London, where he spent most of his childhood and adolescence. Growing up in a peripatetic Jewish household amid post-war Britain's institutional anti-Semitism—evident in restricted access to clubs, sports, and politics—Cohen attended a British prep school, where he and other Jewish pupils experienced marginalization and a persistent sense of otherness. His parents' decision to raise him in England reflected Sydney's professional ambitions, but June's alienation from London's gray climate and social isolation exacerbated her mental health struggles, fostering an atmosphere of unspoken trauma and diaspora-rooted resilience in the home. Despite material comfort, Cohen later reflected on the emotional toll of his mother's illness and the family's suppressed Eastern European heritage, which remained unarticulated during his youth.

Roger Cohen was born on August 2, 1956, in London to Jewish parents of South African origin, marking the beginning of a peripatetic family life shaped by migration and assimilation challenges. His mother, June Adler Cohen, descended from Lithuanian Jews who had fled the Pale of Settlement, embodying a broader Ashkenazi diaspora pattern of displacement from Eastern Europe amid pogroms and economic hardship. The family soon relocated to South Africa, where Cohen spent his early childhood, before returning to London, reflecting a pattern of rootlessness that Cohen attributes to his parents' pursuit of professional opportunities—his father, Sydney Cohen, a physician, and his mother, a magistrate. This heritage traces back to Cohen's great-grandparents' exodus from shtetls like Human Street in Lithuania, a journey chronicled in his 2015 memoir The Girl from Human Street: A Jewish Family Odyssey, which highlights the intergenerational transmission of trauma from anti-Semitic violence and relocation.