Tag Archives: World War II

Jew of the Week: Two-Gun Cohen

The Jewish General Revered in China and Taiwan

Moszek Abram Miączyn (1887-1970) was born in Poland to a deeply religious Jewish family. When he was two years old, the family moved to England and changed their last name to Cohen. Growing up in poverty, he got into a lot of trouble and was sent to a Rothschild-funded school for wayward youth. In 1905, his parents sent him to Canada to work on a farm, hoping it would strengthen and mature the young man. Now known as Morris Cohen, he became a typical “cowboy” and, when not raising livestock, spent his time in saloons, playing cards, shooting guns, and ending up in jail on several occasions. Cohen befriended Chinese immigrants working on the Canadian Pacific Railway. At the time, racism and abuse against the Chinese was rampant, and Cohen soon gained a reputation as the only white man who stood up for them. This eventually brought him an invitation from Sun Yat-sen, renowned philosopher and freedom fighter, who led the resistance in overthrowing the Chinese monarchy and who is today revered as a founding father in both China and Taiwan. Cohen and Sun Yat-sen became close friends. Meanwhile, Cohen enlisted in the military during World War I, fighting valiantly and rising to the rank of sergeant. When he was shot and injured in his right arm, he decided he needed to learn how to shoot with his left, too, and carried a revolver on both sides, earning the nickname “Two-Gun Cohen”. Upon his return to Canada, Cohen found himself without money or work. He headed to China and rejoined Sun Yat-sen, becoming his advisor and aide-de-camp. He helped in building China’s railways, and at the same time trained Sun Yat-sen’s revolutionary troops. Cohen became Sun Yat-sen’s personal bodyguard, and was given the Chinese name Ma Kun. After Sun Yat-sen’s passing, Cohen continued to work for the Kuomintang (the Chinese Nationalist Party), and was given the rank of major-general in the Revolutionary Army. During World War II, Cohen fought alongside the Chinese against the Japanese. He was captured in one battle, imprisoned and tortured, and was only freed in December 1943 in a prisoner exchange. He settled in Montreal and got married. In 1947, as the UN vote on the partition of Israel approached, Cohen heard that China planned to oppose, so he reached out to his contacts and made sure the Chinese government would abstain, which they did. Cohen remained neutral during the China-Taiwan split in 1949, and was one of the few people in the world permitted to travel directly between the two countries, as he was admired in both. At his funeral in Manchester, England’s Blackley Jewish Cemetery in 1970, delegations from both China and Taiwan arrived, marking one of the rare occasions when the two governments appeared together in public. Cohen’s life inspired at least three films, including The Gunrunner, where Cohen’s character was played by Kevin Costner.

Words of the Week

Since the Exodus, freedom has always spoken with a Hebrew accent.
– Heinrich Heine

Jew of the Week: Abraham Maslow

Founder of Positive Psychology

Abraham Harold Maslow (1908-1970) was born in Brooklyn to Jewish-Russian immigrant parents from Kiev. Maslow grew up in poverty and faced a great deal of antisemitism. He wasn’t happy at home either, and spent most of his time at the library reading. In high school, he was the editor of the school’s Latin and physics magazines. Maslow went on to study at City College of New York, and then took up psychology at the University of Wisconsin, where he did experiments and studies on primate behaviour. He moved on to Columbia University, where he worked with Alfred Adler, then taught at Brooklyn College and later at Brandeis University. After World War II, distraught by the Holocaust and the ravages of war, he switched his focus to mental health and human potential, founding a new branch of psychology called humanistic psychology, or positive psychology. The core idea behind humanistic psychology is that every person has the innate ability to grow, heal, and attain happiness and self-actualization. The job of the therapist is only to remove the obstacles that are holding a person back from achieving those goals. As Maslow described it: “Freud supplied us the sick half of psychology and we must now fill it out with the healthy half.” This inspired other psychologists and researchers like Carl Rogers, who pioneered client-centered therapy, and Martin Seligman, who coined “learned helplessness” and proposed Well-Being Theory. The most famous result of Maslow’s work was the Hierarchy of Needs, a pyramid that shows the five major necessities of a human being. At the bottom are the basic physiological needs which are most pressing, but provide the least happiness and satisfaction in the long term. At the top is self-actualization, living a harmonious life of purpose and meaning, which is the most difficult to attain but provides the highest degree of happiness and lasting satisfaction. In 1961, Maslow cofounded the Journal of Humanistic Psychology. His most popular book was The Psychology of Science, where he coined the well-known saying that “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. Maslow was voted Humanist of the Year in 1967, and has been ranked among the top 10 greatest and most-cited psychologists of all time.

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Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Words of the Week

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
– CS Lewis

Jews of the Week: Edith Head & William Wyler

Two Oscar Record Holders

Edith Claire Posener (1897-1981) was born in California to Jewish parents of German heritage. She studied languages at UC Berkeley and Stanford and became a high school language teacher. To make a little more money, she offered to teach art as well, although she had no professional training in the subject. A year after marrying Charles Head, she got a job as a costume sketch artist for Paramount Pictures. Very quickly, she became one of Hollywood’s most popular costume designers. She was the go-to choice for top stars like Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, and Bette Davis. Nominated for a whopping 35 Academy Awards, Head won 8 times, giving her the record for most Oscars won by a woman to this day. All in all, Head worked for 43 years at Paramount Pictures and another 14 at Universal Pictures, designing costumes until her very last days. She also designed the women’s uniform for the US Coast Guard. Head made cameo appearances in a number of TV shows and films, and was the inspiration for the character of Edna Mode in Pixar’s The Incredibles. Among her other honours is a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and a 2003 commemorative stamp from the US Postal Service. Edith Head passed away in the same year that another famous Jewish-German Oscar record holder did:

William Wyler (1902-1981) was born in France, where he grew up very poor, and often skipped school to sneak into movies. His mother eventually called up her wealthy cousin in America—Carl Laemmle, the founder of Universal Pictures—to ask for help. Laemmle brought young Wyler to New York, where he first served for a year with the National Guard. Wyler then moved to Hollywood and got his first job cleaning stages and moving sets. He then broke off on his own to become a director. Wyler worked round-the-clock, and by the early 1930s made a name for himself as a creative filmmaker. He churned out some of the greatest hits of the era, including Wuthering Heights and Mrs. Miniver, which won 6 Oscars, including the first Best Director for Wyler. During World War II, he focused on making anti-Nazi and pro-British films, but many of them were blocked by the US government, who wanted to maintain a neutral stance at first. Mrs. Miniver changed that, with both Roosevelt and Winston Churchill loving the film, the latter even declaring: “Mrs. Miniver is propaganda worth 100 battleships!” In 1942, Wyler enlisted in the US Army and served as an Air Force major. He continued to make films while literally risking his life flying over battlefields. He got injured, lost hearing in one ear, and returned to America at the end of the war a disabled veteran. He eventually went back to Hollywood and continued to make huge hits. The biggest was 1959’s Ben-Hur, which won a record-breaking 11 Oscars, with Wyler winning his third for Best Director. The film saved MGM from bankruptcy (making $90 million on a $15 million budget). It was also Wyler that brought Barbra Streisand to cinema when he cast her in the 1968 Funny Girl, for which she won a Best Actress Oscar—making her one of 14 people to win the award thanks to Wyler (another record). He retired in 1970, having made 67 films, 13 of which won Best Picture. He was known as “40-take Wyler” because he would retake scenes over and over again to get them perfectly right. He remains the most-nominated director in Oscar history, and was voted one of the top 50 “outstanding Americans”.

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Words of the Week

A word is worth one coin, silence is worth two.
– Talmud, Megillah 18a

Some of Edith Head’s costume designs for Anne Baxter’s Nefertari character in the 1956 classic ‘The Ten Commandments’.