Professor Richard Cohen

Professor Richard Cohen

Richard I. Cohen is the incumbent Paulette and Claude Kelman Chair in French Jewry Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the department of the History of the Jewish People. Born in Montréal, Québec Canada, he immigrated to Israel in 1967, after completing a BA in History and Sociology at McGill University. In Jerusalem, while pursuing graduate work in modern Jewish history, he taught at the Hebrew University and worked as a curator in the Israel Museum. Following the completion of his dissertation in 1981 (summa cum laude) at the Hebrew University, he joined its department of the History of the Jewish People and has served as its chair.

Professor Cohen has specialized in the areas of western and central European Jewish history and focused on the interrelationship between art and society in the modern period. His work on French Jewry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries led to many articles and three major publications: The Burden of Conscience. French-Jewish Leadership during the Holocaust (Indiana University Press, 1987); he also edited and introduced the war-time diary of Raymond-Raoul Lambert, Carnet d’un témoin, 1940-1943 (Fayard, Paris, 1985; Diary of a Witness, 1940-1943, Ivan R. Dee Publisher, Chicago, 2007), and has edited The French Revolution and Its Historical Impact (Shazar Center, Jerusalem, 1991 {Hebrew}); Image and Sound: Art, Music and History (Zalman Shazar Center: Jerusalem, 2007 {Hebrew}) and with Jeremy Cohen, The Jewish Contribution to Civilization: Reassessing an Idea (Oxford, Portland- Oregon, The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2007). He was also the editor of Vision and Conflict in the Holy Land (St. Martin’s Press, 1985) and has served on the editorial board of the Encyclopaedia of the Holocaust.

Professor Cohen’s interest in art and history has been at the center of his attention for more than two decades. In attempting to incorporate visual material into the study and teaching of history, he edited with Ezra Mendelsohn a volume entitled: Art and Its Uses: The Visual Image and Modern Jewish Society, vol. 6 of Studies in Contemporary Jewry (Oxford University Press, New York, 1990). He co-curated with Vivian Mann of The Jewish Museum in New York the exhibition From Court Jews to the Rothschilds: Art, Patronage, and Power, 1600-1800 (Jewish Museum, New York, 1996) and they co-edited the exhibition catalogue (Prestel, Munich, 1996). Professor Cohen published Jewish Icons. Art and Society in Modern Europe (University of California Press, 1998), the recipient of the Arnold Wischnitzer Prize for the best book in Jewish History, awarded by the Institute of Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University in 1999. He co-curated (with Laurence Sigal) an exhibition on “The Wandering Jew” at the Museum of Jewish Art in Paris (2001-2002) and co-edited the exhibition catalogue. He has also served as the consultant curator of the exhibition “The Emergence of Jewish Artists in Nineteenth-Century Europe,” (The Jewish Museum, New York, 2001) and contributed to its catalogue.

Professor Cohen has contributed to the National Jewish Book Award anthology edited by David Biale, Cultures of the Jews. A New History (Schocken Books, New York, 2002) and together with Ezra Mendelsohn he is presently engaged in writing a survey of modern Jewish history, to be published by New England University Press.

Professor Cohen served as one of three editors of the Israel Historical Society’s journal Zion from 1994-2001. He presently serves on the editorial boards of The Jewish Quarterly Review and Images and formerly chaired the Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History’s Publications Committee. He was a member of the executive committee of the Leo Baeck Institute in Jerusalem from 1994-2003.

Richard Cohen has served as the head of the Hebrew University’s President’s Conference on Jewish Culture and Identity (1999) and was the Academic Head of Revivim: Honors Program for the Training of Teachers of Jewish Studies in Israeli Secondary Schools (2003-2006). He has taught at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Yale University,  the Ludwig-Maxilimians-University in Munich, Wesleyan University, and at the University of Pennsylvania, where he served as the Ellie and Herb Katz Distinguished Fellow at the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. He has lectured widely in Austria, Canada, England, France, Germany, Holland, Romania, Russia, Switzerland and United States, and has been awarded various prizes and honors.

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