Benyamin Cohen Named Forward News Director
Former AJT staffer assumes top role at iconic Jewish newspaper.
Former Atlantan Benyamin Cohen, a staff writer for the Atlanta Jewish Times about 20 years ago, has been named news director of The Forward, the iconic Jewish newspaper now an online publication.
After serving in similar editorial roles at other Jewish and secular publications, including those in Atlanta, Cohen assumed his new responsibility Jan. 11.
Cohen has spent most of his writing career in Jewish journalism. He founded and edited Jewsweek, a culture webzine in the early 2000s, and then served as the editor of American Jewish Life Magazine. Until his appointment at The Forward, Cohen was editorial director of Narrative Content Group, which runs From the Grapevine, a website about all things Israeli, other than politics and religion, whose audience he helped grow to 20 million users a year.
Cohen has written for The Washington Post, The Daily Beast, The Huffington Post, Yahoo News and Slate. He is the author of “My Jesus Year: A Rabbi’s Son Wanders the Bible Belt in Search of His Own Faith” (HarperCollins), a book about spending 52 Sundays in 52 different churches.
The Forward, formerly known as The Jewish Daily Forward, was founded in 1897 as a daily Yiddish-language socialist newspaper, which served the Eastern European Jewish immigrant population and featured prominent Jewish writers such as Isaac Bashevis Singer and Sholem Asch. It became the most widely read Jewish newspaper in America, and by the 1920s its circulation outstripped The New York Times.
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