The World of Leonard Cohen
Edited by David R. Shumway
Cambridge University Press, 398pp, $35

The Torah has 70 faces — how many did Leonard Cohen have? To go by bibliography, 70 seems conservative.

Books devoted to the singer-songwriter and poet, including a graphic novel treatment, are a cottage industry. There are texts on the “Mystical Roots” of his genius, Alan Light’s authoritative study of his song “Hallelujah,” an account of his tour of the Sinai during the Yom Kippur War and surveys about the critical response to his oeuvre. Entering the mix is The World of Leonard Cohen, a 24-essay collection breaking down the multitudes the man contained.

“More than Dylan or anyone else in popular music, he remains a mystery because he doesn’t fit any of the usual categories,” editor David R. Shumway writes in his introduction. “Almost any statement you can make about him must immediately be qualified or be met with a contrary.”

Indeed, Cohen defies a strict taxonomy: an English-speaking Jewish Buddhist monk who grew up in a Catholic francophone town and established himself as a poet before entering the music industry. Throughout his life, he shapeshifted, from enfant terrible of the Montreal literary scene to depressive psalmist, wizened ladies’ man and, after a years-long exile, a humble, appreciative elder statesman whose fan base peaked sometime after his AARP eligibility.

Shumway’s book begins with essays covering Cohen’s creative life, then moves onto his musical, religious and cultural contexts with a kind of epilogue for his legacy and a tease of the treasures to come in his archive.

Many of the early details — provided in Ira Nadel’s quick, first chapter biography — may not be new to Cohen acolytes. The familiar tale of 9-year-old Cohen burying his first poem in his father’s bowtie and his “messianic childhood” is given its proper due.

Gillian A.M. Mitchell’s consideration of how Cohen — who discovered The People’s Song Book as a Jewish summer camp counselor — floated in the folk music periphery hints at the trickiness of genre. Shumway’s subsequent chapter, which suggests Cohen was the ur-singer-songwriter, may be overstating its case. (He himself seems to admit the lack of a confessional quality sets Cohen apart from the likes of Joni Mitchell, even if their dalliance inspired her move away from folk.)

Most engaging in the volume, on a man who relished contradictions, are the diverging details, which build out on a minimal p’shat — or surface text — with what feels like midrash.

A Flamenco guitarist, who taught Cohen his limited repertoire of chords (what Cohen called his “chop”) gets an early mention. Only later do we read their lessons were cut short by the guitarist’s suicide. Some chapters note how the press assigned Cohen the moniker “The Canadian Bob Dylan.” Later ones note how Cohen, at a party with the “Montreal Group” of poets, “solemnly announc[ed] that he would become the Canadian Dylan, a statement all dismissed.” Who brought the Dylan records to that shindig is a detail left up for grabs.

Many chapters tell the origin story for Cohen’s New York debut with Judy Collins, placing it at Town Hall. Others contend the incident — which saw Cohen leave the stage in fear — put the incident earlier at the Village Theatre. Sylvie Simmons, author of  I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen, discovered the discrepancy in a letter Cohen sent to his lover Marianne Ihlen, putting Simmons at odds with other biographers.

The final chapter, on the Cohen archive, quotes that letter and gives a fuller picture of what, exactly, went wrong.

“I stepped up to the mike, hit a chord on my guitar,” Cohen wrote, “found the instrument had gone completely out of tune, tried to tune it, couldn’t, decided to sing anyhow, couldn’t get more than a croak out of my throat, managed four lines of ‘Suzanne,’ my voice unbelievably flat, then I broke off and said simply, “Sorry, I just can’t make it,” and walked off the stage, my fingers like rubber bands, the people baffled and my career in music dying among the coughs of the people backstage.”

He then reports the “curious happiness” of his failure, which, when Collins coaxed him back onstage, became a success.

This being Cohen, several essays are given to his spiritual seeking. Sadly, the entry on his Jewishness is at times the most opaque.

“From Cohen’s perspective, to fulfill its prophetic mission, Judaism must serve as the speculum through which to envision the universalization of the particular in the particularization of the universal.” writes Jewish mysticism scholar Elliot R. Wolfson, chasing that observation by noting how the “Jew attests figurally to the fact that the general must always be measured from the standpoint of an individuality that withstands collapsing the difference between self and other in the othering of the self as the self of the other.”

Clearer is the section on Buddhist affinities, by Christophe Lebold, author of Leonard Cohen: The Man Who Saw the Angels Fall. Lebold teases out how Cohen’s zen practice informed his lyrics and poetry, fusing with his Jewishness to create a syncretic philosophy.

The essay on Christianity by Marcia Pally is fine, but insists at times on a mono-reading of Cohen’s words. It also contains a risible parenthetical: “Jesus sustained covenantal bonds; no one else has (save Abraham and Moses).” This, to me, may as well have read “Jeff Buckley sang ‘Hallelujah;’ no one else did (save Leonard Cohen and John Cale).”

The overall effect of this volume, which also includes essays on the use of Cohen’s music in film, his image management in documentaries and his appeal to women, is to come away with great insights and still be at a loss.

David Boucher’s section on Cohen’s politics makes a case for Cohen as a contrarian who concealed his purportedly conservative politics to better cater to his liberal fanbase.

Somehow, even after being pistol-whipped by Phil Spector while recording Death of a Ladies’ Man, he was “undoubtedly a proud NRA member.” In a 1988 documentary for Canadian television, he opined that drugs coming into America constituted a legitimate “attack” and suggested the Army “go in and bomb the countries” responsible. (The man who wrote “The Future” showed some prescience here.)

Was he just being provocative for the fun of it? Probably. He did a fair amount of drugs. In a notebook from his archive that points to Cohen’s infatuation with Velvet Underground chanteuse Nico, he wrote how he “asked her to get heroin.”

Cohen studies continue, soon to be aided by the digitization of his archive of notebooks, film, photographs, visual art and recordings. Will these artifacts bring us closer, or further away, from understanding the man?

He spent a lifetime trying to figure himself out. We don’t stand a chance.

The post 24 visions of Leonard Cohen, no clear picture of who he was appeared first on The Forward.

CROWN HEIGHTS — A driver crashed a car into an entrance of the Chabad-Lubavitch world headquarters in Brooklyn on Wednesday night, damaging the building on a night thousands had gathered there to celebrate.

Video circulating online and verified by eyewitnesses shows a vehicle repeatedly driving into the building’s doors at 770 Eastern Parkway in the Crown Heights neighborhood, the main synagogue of the Chabad movement and one of the most recognized Jewish institutions in the world. One witness said the driver had yelled at bystanders to move out of the way before he drove down a ramp leading to the doors.

Police arrested the driver at the scene and the synagogue was evacuated as a precaution.

The incident occurred on a festive evening in the Chabad world — Yud Shevat, the day that Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson took the movement’s reins in 1951. Chabad revelers from around the globe travel to Crown Heights each year to celebrate the occasion at farbrengens, or toasts, that are spread out in Chabad homes all over the neighborhood. The largest one is held at the movement’s iconic headquarters — Schneerson’s former home — with as many as 3,000 people in attendance.

Avrohom Pink, a 19-year-old Chabad yeshiva student, said the program at the headquarters had just concluded when the incident occurred.

He and a couple dozen others stood near the top of a ramp down to the pair of doors, a sedan turned into the driveway. Its driver, who Pink said was in his mid-twenties or early thirties with shoulder-length hair, yelled at people to get out of the way.

“He was trying to pull in, yelling at everyone to move out the way, interestingly — didn’t want to run people over, I guess,” Pink said. “Everyone moved out the way, and then he just drove down the ramp, rammed his car into those doors.”

While the car managed to push in the wooden doors, there was nobody in the anteroom they led to. The approximately 1,000 people Pink estimated were still in the building were behind another pair of doors on the other side of that room. Over the din of their celebration, they couldn’t hear what was going on, Pink said.

Rabbi Motti Seligson, a spokesperson for the movement, said on X that the ramming “seems intentional, but the motivations are unclear.”

The incident is being investigated as a hate crime by the NYPD Hate Crimes Task Force, Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said.

During the election campaign and since taking office, Mayor Zohran Mamdani has repeatedly said he is committed to protecting Jewish New Yorkers and ensuring security around synagogues and other houses of worship.

The attack follows a rash of antisemitic incidents across the city. On Tuesday, a rabbi was verbally harassed and assaulted in Forest Hills, Queens, and last week, a playground frequented by Orthodox families in the Borough Park neighborhood in Brooklyn was graffitied with swastikas two days in a row. In both incidents, the suspects have been arrested. Antisemitic incidents accounted for 57% of reported hate crimes in 2025, according to the NYPD.

While the driver’s intent remained unclear, condemnation poured in from elected leaders.

City Council Speaker Julie Menin called it a “horrifying incident” and a “deeply concerning situation.” New York State Attorney General Letitia James, who has close ties to the community, posted on X, “These acts of violence against our Jewish communities, and any of our communities, need to stop. Now.”

Mayor Zohran Mamdani arrived at the scene about two hours of the incident being reported and denounced the attack. “This is deeply alarming, especially given the deep meaning and history of the institution to so many in New York and around the world,” Mamdani said in a statement, standing alongside Police Tisch, who is Jewish. ”Any threat to a Jewish institution or place of worship must be taken seriously.” The mayor added that “antisemitism has no place in our city” and expressed solidarity with the Crown Heights Jewish community,

During the election campaign and since taking office, Mamdani has repeatedly said he is committed to protecting Jewish New Yorkers and ensuring security around synagogues and other houses of worship.

The incident came during a rash of antisemitic incidents across the city. On Tuesday, a rabbi was verbally harassed and assaulted in Forest Hills, Queens, and last week, a playground frequented by Orthodox families in the Borough Park neighborhood in Brooklyn was graffitied with swastikas two days in a row. In both incidents, the suspects have been arrested. Antisemitic incidents accounted for 57% of reported hate crimes in 2025, according to the NYPD.

The celebrations, which also mark the yahrtzeit of the Rebbe’s predecessor in 1950, continued at other locations in spite of the incident.

Pink described Yud Shevat as “Rosh Hashana for Chabad.”

”

The post What we know about the car crash at Chabad-Lubavitch Headquarters in Brooklyn appeared first on The Forward.

Commanders and members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps meet with Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Tehran, Iran, Aug. 17, 2023. Photo: Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS

The European Union could soon label Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organization, after France and Spain signaled a shift in support amid mounting international outrage over the Iranian regime’s violent crackdown on anti-government protests and shocking reports of widespread civilian deaths.

As two of the largest EU member states previously to oppose blacklisting the IRGC, France and Spain could tip the balance and pave the way for the designation, as the regime’s brutal suppression of dissent at home and support for terrorist operations abroad continues.

On Wednesday, a day before EU foreign ministers meet in Brussels to discuss the issue, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot announced that France will back the move to blacklist the IRGC, saying the repression of peaceful protesters must not go unanswered and praising their courage in the face of what he described as “blind violence.”

“France will support the designation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on the European Union’s list of terrorist organizations,” he posted on X.

After reversing its long-standing opposition to the move, France also urged Iran to free detained protesters, halt executions, restore digital access, and permit the UN Human Rights Council to investigate alleged abuses.

Multiple media outlets also reported that the Spanish government is expected to back the EU’s move to blacklist the IRGC, aligning with France in breaking its previous opposition.

The United States, Canada, and Australia have already designated the IRGC as a terrorist organization, while Germany and the Netherlands have repeatedly called on the EU to do the same.

Some European countries, however, have been more cautious, fearing such a move could lead to a complete break in ties with Iran, which could impact negotiations to release citizens held in Iranian prisons.

The EU has already sanctioned the IRGC for human rights abuses but not terrorism.

Labeling the IRGC as a terrorist organization would not only extend existing EU sanctions, including asset freezes, funding bans, and travel restrictions on its members, but also activate additional legal, financial, and diplomatic measures that would severely limit its operations across Europe.

Earlier this week, Italy also reversed its earlier hesitation and signaled support for the measure after new reports exposed the scale of Iran’s brutal crackdown on anti-government protests — a move that sparked diplomatic tensions, with the Iranian Foreign Ministry summoning the Italian ambassador.

According to local media, Iranian authorities warned of the “destructive consequences” of any labeling against the IRGC, calling upon Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani to “correct his ill-considered approaches toward Iran.”

Tajani said the Iranian regime’s bloody crackdown on anti-government protests this month that reportedly killed thousands of people could not be ignored.

“The losses suffered by the civilian population during the protests require a clear response,” Tajani wrote on X. “I will propose, coordinating with other partners, the inclusion of the Revolutionary Guards on the list of terrorist organizations, as well as individual sanctions against those responsible for these heinous acts.”

As international scrutiny over the regime grows, new estimates show that thousands have been killed by Iranian security forces during an unprecedented crackdown on nationwide protests earlier this month, far surpassing previous death tolls.

Two senior Iranian Ministry of Health officials told TIME that as many as 30,000 people could have been killed in the streets of Iran on Jan. 8 and 9 alone.

The Iranian regime has previously reported an official death toll of 3,117. But new evidence suggests the true number is far higher, raising fears among activists and world leaders of crimes against humanity.

The US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), which tracks deaths by name and location, has confirmed 5,858 deaths, including 214 security personnel. Nearly 20,000 potential deaths are still under investigation, and tens of thousands of additional Iranians have been arrested amid the crackdown.

Established after Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, the IRGC wields significant power in the country, controlling large sectors of the economy and armed forces, overseeing Iran’s ballistic missile and nuclear programs, and coordinating closely with the regime’s terrorist proxies in the region.

Unlike the regular armed forces, the IRGC is a parallel military body charged with protecting Iran’s authoritarian regime, ensuring its so-called Islamist revolution is protected within the country and can be exported abroad.