There was no clean knockout when New York Times columnist Roger Cohen faced off against some 400 Iranian Jews and Bahais in Los Angeles, but spectators were treated to some vigorous rhetorical sparring and nimble footwork. Cohen, a British-born Jewish journalist, wrote a column last month from Iran titled “What Iran’s Jews Say” claiming that Jews in the Islamic Republic were “living, working and worshiping in relative tranquility.” Despite Holocaust denials and rants by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad about wiping Israel off the map, Cohen wrote from Esfahan, “as a Jew, I have seldom been treated with such consistent warmth as in Iran.”
