Cohen, Jared 1981–

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Cohen, Jared 1981–

PERSONAL:

Born November 24, 1981. Education: Stanford University, B.A.; Oxford University, M.Phil.

ADDRESSES:

Office—U.S. Department of State, 2201 C St. N.W., Washington, DC 20520.

CAREER:

Policy Planning staff member, U.S. Department of State, Washington, DC, 2006—.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Rhodes Scholarship.

WRITINGS:

Children of Jihad: A Young American's Travels among the Youth of the Middle East, Gotham Books (New York, NY), 2007.

One Hundred Days of Silence: America and the Rwanda Genocide, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers (Lanham, MD), 2007.

SIDELIGHTS:

While pursuing a graduate degree in international relations at Oxford University, Jared Cohen traveled throughout the Middle East, meeting with young people in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. "What drew me to the Middle East," he told HIA Senior Fellow Blog interviewer Laura Jacobovitz, "was the same intellectual curiosity that thousands of college kids and graduate students around America were experiencing." What kept his interest, however was the "unexpected reality" that he found there. "I stumbled into a youth culture that was all too familiar to my own and was inspired by what I saw as more similarities than differences across youth cultures." Cohen documented this experience of youth culture in his book Children of Jihad: A Young American's Travels among the Youth of the Middle East.

Brent White, writing in In These Times, deemed the book as "an eye-opening read." Cohen challenges stereotypes of Muslim youth as uniformly pious and conservative, describing many encounters with young men and women who questioned authority and participated in forbidden behaviors, such as drinking alcohol or using proscribed Internet sites such as MySpace. In one episode, he attends a beach party in Beirut where Muslims, Christians, Palestinians, Syrians, Druze, and others partake of the festivities together. Cohen found much of the anti-American sentiment he heard from young people to be formulaic and insincere; indeed, he notes that he often heard positive opinions about Americans even in countries where anti-U.S. sentiment is supposedly high, such as Iran. When he did meet young men who showed him a room filled with weapons, such as guns and grenades, Cohen writes, he was impressed with their desire for peace. "Despite their gaudy displays of weaponry and the ominous threat of physical violence that bubbled just beneath the surface, I could see that these youth were weak and broken inside," he explained to White.

Another surprise for Cohen was that he never experienced hostility because of his Jewish identity—which he never tried to hide. "The young people I met were more similar to me as a young American Jew than they were different," he told Jacobovitz. "I strongly believe that the largest party in every country is the metaphorical ‘youth party’ and it doesn't necessarily have a political, ethnic, religious, national, or sectarian face to it. Many of these young people share the same hopes, dreams and desires as the youth in America. They are trying to figure out who they are and what their role is in society."

A writer for Kirkus Reviews considered Children of Jihad "riveting from start to finish." White expressed similar praise, calling the book "a compelling, if far too brief, portrait of an often-overlooked demographic of the world—one who will, Cohen reminds us, undoubtedly be responsible for creating and shaping the ideas and alliances necessary to achieve the lasting peace sought by the youth in every part of the world."

In One Hundred Days of Silence: America and the Rwanda Genocide, Cohen provides an analysis of the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and the failure of western countries to stop it. The violence, which lasted only about a hundred days, resulted in the deaths of more than 800,000 civilians—mostly ethnic Tutsis killed by the Hutu majority, but also some more moderate Hutu as well. Traveling throughout the region in 2001 and 2002, and interviewing many key players, Cohen explains the background of the conflict and analyzes various theories as to why the United Nations and western powers, chiefly the United States and France, refused to intervene to prevent the carnage. Finding these theories helpful but incomplete, Cohen explains in the preface to his book: "I capture the Rwandan perspectives, many of which have never been heard before." His research, he states in the book's introduction, convinced him that "U.S. policy toward Rwanda during the genocide was nothing shy of one hundred days of silence."