Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Tuesday 24 May
6:15 PM - 7:15 PM
Award-winning journalist and author Roger Cohen has worked from 15 different countries as a foreign correspondent, reporting for some of the most prestigious news outlets in the globe. His association with the New York Times has spanned 25 years – as a foreign correspondent, foreign editor, and now as an op-ed columnist. Of his trade, he’s said: ‘The journalist moves in the opposite direction from the crowd, toward danger, often leaving the settled majority perplexed.’
In the latest of Cohen’s four books – 2015’s The Girl from Human Street: Ghosts of Memory in a Jewish Family – he turns that reporting ethos to his own family’s complex and itinerant history, centring on his mother’s travails with mental illness, geographical displacement and loneliness. It’s a slow-burning account of love, revealed layer by layer; it’s also an intergenerational search for the meaning of Cohen’s complex inheritance, and for ‘Jewishness’, touching on his sometimes controversial views on key issues facing modern Israel.
Roger Cohen meets Fifth Estate host Sally Warhaft for a wide-ranging spotlight conversation on his life, his body of work and international affairs.
Featuring
Sally Warhaft
Sally Warhaft is a Melbourne broadcaster, anthropologist and writer. She is the host of The Fifth Estate, the Wheeler Centre’s live series focusing on journalism, politics, media, and international relations, and The Leap Year ...
Roger Cohen
Roger Cohen has worked for The New York Times for 25 years as a foreign correspondent, foreign editor, and now columnist. Prior to that he worked for The Wall Street Journal and Reuters. He is the author of four books. The latest, a family memoir entitled The Girl from Human Street: Ghosts of Memory in a Jewish Family (2015), was published to wide acclaim.
He has taught at Harvard and Princeton and his work has been recognized with several awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Award from Britain's Next Century Foundation and a prize from the Overseas Press Club of New York. Raised in South Africa and England, a graduate of Balliol College, Oxford, he is a naturalized American.