Prof. Jacob Cohen (AMST) is a man of many names. His legal birth name is "Jerome," but his students call him "Jerry."
Arriving on campus only a little over a decade after the University's founders in 1960, Cohen is a trove of insights on the history he teaches but has also lived.
In 1960, Cohen arrived on campus to interview for a faculty position in the history department. Before joining the Brandeis faculty, Cohen taught at Yale University. Some questioned his decision to leave a school with such a storied academic reputation for a one that was still in its infancy. Yet for him, Brandeis was a natural choice. "My reasons for coming you could put on a Hallmark greeting card," Cohen said. "My family-a Jewish family-a Zionist family, revered the name of Louis Brandeis. It was an absolutely natural fit."
Unlike the hiring process today, Cohen met with faculty members across all departments before he was offered a teaching position. "Every major campus intellectual came to speak with me. Everyone was interested in whom the University was hiring and who fit in with the intellectual community ... My heart was pounding, I was thrilled," he said.
Cohen says that his teaching style hasn't changed one bit in all the years he's taught. Although he often teaches lecture classes with around 100 students enrolled, he still reads, grades and writes lengthy comments on every paper by himself, a practice he reported is "really stupid and not very bright in terms of my time, as people tell me."
Although Cohen is on leave this semester, you may still see him around campus completing various tasks for a book he is writing entitled Inner-Most Part: Brandeis University and the Jewish Question. It will blend historical analysis and personal memoir in an exploration of Judaism and Brandeis as it attempts to understand what it means to be a "Jewish-sponsored" university.
Cohen's book will address Brandeis' complicated relationship with its Jewish roots, specifically the identity crisis the University underwent in the 1980s. "There was a conspicuous effort to un-Jew the place," Cohen said. SAT scores were dropping and the administration felt pressure to diversify, a goal they slowly achieved since then, with over 50 percent of the population now being non-Jewish.
This is not the first time Cohen has excused himself from teaching in pursuit of other ambitions. In 1963, only three years after he began his career at Brandeis, he left the University for what he considered a permanent separation at the time in order to, as he described it, save the world.
"It didn't work," Cohen said. He had left academia to work with a civil rights organization called the Congress On Racial Equality,where he worked closely with the national director of the organization and edited its magazine.
Cohen joined CORE when the organization was very much centered on themes of equality and the notion that race doesn't matter, as expressed in Dr. Martin Luther King's famous speech, in which he stated "I look to a day where people will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." But while Cohen was working there, the organization turned an ideological corner. "CORE underwent a dramatic change from the ideology of black and white integration to black separatism ... and black self-assertion."
In 1965, he left the organization. "I wasn't supposed to be there," Cohen said.
Before Cohen returned to the University in 1968 as a faculty member of the newly formed American Studies department, he spearheaded an initiative called Upward Bound, which worked to get disadvantaged youth into college. When Cohen did return, he would do similar work as a creator and founding director of the Myra Kraft Transitional Year Program in April of 1968.
Cohen got right back in the groove of what he likes doing: teaching. "Asking me which is my favorite course is like asking me which is my favorite kid and you know I'm not telling you and I'm not telling them," Cohen said. "But of course I love them all equally," he added.
As early as 1971, Cohen began to teach a course about the 1960s, reported one year in the course guide as one of the best classes at Brandeis, and which addressed topics such as the civil rights movement and student radicalism on college campuses.
Cohen will introduce a new course for the coming spring semester called "Digital Media and American Culture," a topic Cohen says his students "know a tremendous [amount] about. Not so much how to think about it, but they really know what it means to be in that world."
Other courses Cohen teaches include "Sports in American Culture", one on the future as it is depicted in American literature and a popular course on conspiracy theories. In fact, Cohen is a major enthusiast of conspiracies and one of the world's foremost scholars on conspiracies around the John F. Kennedy assassination.
Aside from his career at Brandeis, Cohen is a singer and has performed at various venues, including Carnegie Hall in 1995.
He is also telepathic, or at least some people think so. He remarks fondly that he still gets a phone call from time to time from a student addressing him as "wizard," another one of his many names. "Hello wizard!" they say and then, as if by magic, Cohen declares the exact playing card in the student's hand for the amusement of everyone on the other side of the call.
Cohen explained that this harmless game serves as a teaching moment between himself and his former students well after they have graduated. The trick is a mundane example of conspiracy theories. "Only we know the truth, and we both need to know in order for the lie to be effective," Cohen said.