Deborah Cohen > Quotes

“She was on her first American lecture tour, addressing audiences on such racy subjects as polygamy. There wasn’t a man living who could gratify four or five women, Rebecca had insisted: “There are many men who cannot make even one woman happy.”
― Deborah Cohen, Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took on a World at War

“What they didn't understand was that the Soviet Union wasn't communism, certainly not as Marx envisioned it. Instead, it was best understood as the most extractive sort of capitalism in which all profits belonged to the state.”
― Deborah Cohen, Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took On a World at War

“in particular, the extraordinary set of American books published in 1919 and 1920: James Branch Cabell’s sex-steeped Jurgen, Carl Sandburg’s gritty Smoke and Steel poems, Sherwood Anderson’s psychological portraits in Winesburg,”
― Deborah Cohen, Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took on a World at War

“army, that’s all.” He couldn’t wait to leave. After the Holocaust, when fascism became synonymous with anti-Semitism and mass murder, the term “Zionist fascisti” would become an almost unimaginable slur. But in 1929, to label Zionists (or segments of Zionism) as fascist was inflammatory but not uncommon. The right-wing Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky had indeed been influenced by European fascist movements, modeling his own paramilitary force on Mussolini’s blackshirts. Jabotinsky’s Jewish opponents in the Zionist Labour movement regularly called him a fascist. When John and Jimmy invoked fascism, they meant that Zionism was expansionist, aggressive, nationalistic, and racially exclusive, all characteristics of the kind of fascism they had seen firsthand in Italy, Romania, and Hungary.”
― Deborah Cohen, Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took on a World at War