Dr. Edy Cohen is a historian and media commentator specializing in inter-Arab relations, the Arab-Israeli conflict, anti-Semitism and holocaust denial in the Arab world, Islamist terrorism, and the history of Jewish communities in the Arab world. Dr. Cohen currently serves as a researcher at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.
Dr. Cohen grew up in Lebanon, completing his early years of education in Christian schools. In 1991, like so many other 20th-century Jews struggling to preserve their rich heritage within hostile Arab societies, Dr. Cohen and his family were forced to flee lethal Arab anti-Semitism.
As a native speaker and writer of Arabic, Dr. Cohen regularly crosses media divides, communicating directly with Arab audiences and providing them with perspectives on Israel and on Jewish people and religion that they would otherwise never receive.
Dr. Cohen earned in 2012, his Ph.D. in Middle Eastern History at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. He has been a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Bar-Ilan University’s Menachem Begin Center for the Study of Resistance Movements in 2013. From October 2013 to January 2014, Dr. Cohen also held a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem, in Jerusalem.
Dr. Cohen is the author of the book The Holocaust in the Eyes of Mahmoud Abbas 2017 (Hebrew) (the book focus on holocaust denial in the Arab world). Dr. Cohen also is the author of the forthcoming book: The Mufti and the Jews: Haj Amin al-Husseini’s involvement in the holocaust and his war against the Jews in Arab lands, which will be published by The Ariel Research Center for Defence and Communications in November 2020.
His future work will be focus on Nazi and Axis propaganda in mandatory Palestine and the Arab World between 1933 and 1945.