Janet Langhart Cohen – författare

Race and racism have played a divisive and defining role throughout much of America's history. Slavery, Jim Crow laws, segregation, and Ku Klux Klan terrorism have inflicted deep psychic wounds, social disparities, and economic disadvantages that have diminished the promise of equal rights and opportunities for all. While much progress in race relations has been made in recent years—including the election of Barack Obama as President of the United State—it's clear that our journey to a post-racial era is far from complete. In virtually every measurable category, whether income levels, job opportunities, access to health care, life expectancy, high school diplomas, incarceration rates, do not fare well compared to their white counterparts. The dialogue entitled Race and Reconciliation in America was convened to provide a forum for a long overdue, open, honest, and constructive discussion among people of good will about the need for the American people to truly grasp the depth of past misdeeds, why the legacies of past oppression persist, and how we can achieve a more fair and just society embodied in the American Dream.

Janet Langhart Cohen's Anne & Emmett: A One-Act Play is an imaginary conversation between Anne Frank and Emmett Till, both victims of racial intolerance and hatred. Frank is the thirteen-year-old Jewish girl whose diary provided a gripping perspective of the Holocaust. Till is the fourteen-year-old African-American boy whose brutal murder in Mississippi sparked the modern American civil rights movement.The one-act play opens with the two teenagers meeting in memory, a place that isolates them from the cruelty they experienced during their lives. The beyond-the-grave encounter draws the startling similarities between the two youths’ harrowing experiences at the hands of societies that couldn't protect them.In memory, Anne recounts hiding in a cramped attic with her family after German dictator Adolf Hitler ordered the Nazi military to round up Jewish people throughout Europe, and put them in concentration camps in route to gas chambers. At the age of fifteen, Anne died of typhus at the Bergen-Belsen Nazi concentration camp in March 1945, a few weeks before British troops liberated the camp.Emmett tells Anne how he, in 1955, ended up being brutally attacked by two white racists who beat and tortured him before shooting him in the head and tossing his body into the Tallahatchie River with a cotton-gin fan tied to his neck. This happened after he whistled at a white woman while visiting his uncle in Money, Mississippi.

Janet Langhart Cohen's Anne & Emmett: A One-Act Play is an imaginary conversation between Anne Frank and Emmett Till, both victims of racial intolerance and hatred. Frank is the thirteen-year-old Jewish girl whose diary provided a gripping perspective of the Holocaust. Till is the fourteen-year-old African-American boy whose brutal murder in Mississippi sparked the modern American civil rights movement.The one-act play opens with the two teenagers meeting in memory, a place that isolates them from the cruelty they experienced during their lives. The beyond-the-grave encounter draws the startling similarities between the two youths' harrowing experiences at the hands of societies that couldn't protect them.In memory, Anne recounts hiding in a cramped attic with her family after German dictator Adolf Hitler ordered the Nazi military to round up Jewish people throughout Europe, and put them in concentration camps in route to gas chambers. At the age of fifteen, Anne died of typhus at the Bergen-Belsen Nazi concentration camp in March 1945, a few weeks before British troops liberated the camp.Emmett tells Anne how he, in 1955, ended up being brutally attacked by two white racists who beat and tortured him before shooting him in the head and tossing his body into the Tallahatchie River with a cotton-gin fan tied to his neck. This happened after he whistled at a white woman while visiting his uncle in Money, Mississippi.

Janet Langhart Cohen's Anne & Emmett: A One-Act Play is an imaginary conversation between Anne Frank and Emmett Till, both victims of racial intolerance and hatred. Frank is the thirteen-year-old Jewish girl whose diary provided a gripping perspective of the Holocaust. Till is the fourteen-year-old African-American boy whose brutal murder in Mississippi sparked the modern American civil rights movement.The one-act play opens with the two teenagers meeting in memory, a place that isolates them from the cruelty they experienced during their lives. The beyond-the-grave encounter draws the startling similarities between the two youths’ harrowing experiences at the hands of societies that couldn't protect them.In memory, Anne recounts hiding in a cramped attic with her family after German dictator Adolf Hitler ordered the Nazi military to round up Jewish people throughout Europe, and put them in concentration camps in route to gas chambers. At the age of fifteen, Anne died of typhus at the Bergen-Belsen Nazi concentration camp in March 1945, a few weeks before British troops liberated the camp.Emmett tells Anne how he, in 1955, ended up being brutally attacked by two white racists who beat and tortured him before shooting him in the head and tossing his body into the Tallahatchie River with a cotton-gin fan tied to his neck. This happened after he whistled at a white woman while visiting his uncle in Money, Mississippi.