Rabbi Martin Samuel Cohen was born and raised in New York City and has been living in Canada since 1985. An ordained rabbi, he holds a Ph.D. in the history of ancient Judaism and has been a Lady Davis fellow at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the Daniel Jeremy Silver fellow at Harvard University. He has been on the faculty of the Jewish Theological Seminary and Hunter College in New York, the Institute for Jewish Studies at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, and the Vancouver School of Theology. Most recently he has lectured on Judaism and Christianity at the University of British Columbia. Married and the father of two sons and a daughter, he is the rabbi of the Beth Tikvah Congregation in Richmond, British Columbia. His first novel, The Truth about Marvin Kalish, was published in 1992 to critical acclaim and is the first in a planned series of provocative novels rooted in the folklore and ordinary mysticism of everyday Jewish life. His first collection of twenty-four essays in Travels on the Private Zodiac provide an excellent introduction to Judaism and the joys and difficulties of Jewish life in contemporary Christian society.
Jewish-Christian Relations