COHEN, NATHAN

COHEN, NATHAN (1923–1971), Canadian critic and journalist. Cohen was born in Sydney, Nova Scotia, and graduated in English from Mt. Allison University. Attracted to the left, Cohen entered journalism as a reporter for the labor press in Cape Breton. Moving to Toronto, he wrote for a number of newspapers and journals including the English-language pages of the leftist Vokhnblat and Canadian Jewish Weekly. By the late 1940s, Cohen's interests shifted from political journalism to arts review, particularly theater criticism. Increasingly respected for his uncompromising pursuit of artistic excellence, he became Canada's foremost arts and theater critic, eventually gaining an international reputation for the quality of his comments. Regarded by many as irascible and iconoclastic, his theater reviews and criticism were seldom shy about what lay behind the theater's facade.

No elitist when it came to the arts, Cohen's voice became familiar across Canada as a broadcast critic for cbc and for ten years as radio and television moderator of Fighting Words, a freewheeling program of social and political debate. With a well-earned reputation as broadcaster and print journalist who helped chart the course of Canadian theater, in 1959 Cohen became drama critic and entertainment editor for the Toronto Star, the largest circulation newspaper in Canada, an association he maintained until his death. Cohen was also a fluent Yiddishist who was known in Jewish circles for his translations of Yiddish poetry and prose.

bibliography:

W.E. Edmonstone, Nathan Cohen: The Making of a Critic (1977).

[Harold Troper (2^nd ed.)]