Ellie Cohanim | |
Birth Name: | Elham Cohanim |
Birth Date: | 10 December 1972 |
Birth Place: | Tehran, Imperial State of Iran |
Education: | Barnard College, Columbia (BA) |
Office: | U.S. Deputy Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism |
Term Start: | November 11, 2019 |
Term End: | January 20, 2021 |
President: | Donald Trump |
1Namedata: | Mike Pompeo |
Predecessor: | Position established |
Successor: | Aaron Keyak |
Party: | Republican Party |
Nationality: | American |
Ellie Cohanim (born December 10, 1972) is an American broadcast journalist who served as Deputy Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism at the United States Department of State during the Donald Trump administration. [1]
Cohanim earned her B.A. in Political Science from Barnard College, Columbia University. She conducted graduate studies in International Relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.[2] [3]
Prior to her position at the United States Department of State, she was a Special Correspondent and Senior Vice President for Jewish Broadcasting Service (JBS) and an Executive at Yeshiva University, the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and UJA-Federation of New York.[4] [5] [6]
Cohanim has criticized the government in Iran[7] and what she has termed their "obsessive anti-Semitism".[8] Cohanim criticized the social media company Twitter over what she deemed their hypocrisy in refusing to censor the Twitter account of the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, who has published countless anti-Semitic tweets calling for the "genocidal" elimination of the State of Israel, while simultaneously censoring the Tweets of President Trump. Cohanim went on to call upon Twitter to completely ban Khamenei from their platform.[9] [10] Cohanim has condemned the terrorist-designated group Hezbollah, citing their ties to Iran, and has publicly stated that the US praises countries which follow the US in designating Hezbollah a terrorist group and freezing their assets.[11] [12]
At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Cohanim proclaimed that the emerging conspiracy theories blaming Jews for the global outbreak and spread of the Coronavirus are a "modern-day blood libel", and admonished government figures in Iran, Turkey, and the Palestinian Authority for spreading these conspiracy theories.[13]
Cohanim was born in Tehran, Iran, to a Jewish family that fled the country at the start of the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and found refuge in the United States.[14] [15]