In January 2018, after the late Leonard Cohen received his last, but not final, Grammy nomination, a representative from his hometown attended the ceremony: The cantor from the synagogue he grew up in. He wasn’t just there as an observer — he was a contributor. “My greatest sources of pride is that the choir and…
Another state occasion, another misuse of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” Across the internet, fans of the poet are pleading: Stop the madness! On Jan. 19, 2021, before the reflecting pool by the Lincoln Memorial, gospel singer Yolanda Adams concluded a somber memorial to the over 400,000 Americans dead of Covid-19 with Cohen’s storied song of sex…
Leonard Cohen would have turned 85 today. Here’s how Ezra Glinter, a Forward editor and fellow Montreal native, profiled the master composer on the occasion of the artist’s 80th birthday in 2014. When I moved to Montreal in the summer of 2004 the city was about to experience two end-of-an-era events, though I knew nothing…
The lobby of the Jewish Museum on the Upper East Side of Manhattan hummed with energy and clinking ice cubes. Museum-goers formed huddles in the entry of the converted mansion — some visitors sat at tables, while others scoured books that are on sale in the museum’s store. Everyone was holding a blush-colored cocktail invented…
Leonard Cohen’s letters, alongside other artifacts belonging to the late poet and songwriter’s one-time muse and lover Marianne Ihlen, have sold for $876,000 in an auction by Christies. Many of the items exceeded their initial asking prices. Among the auctioned items was a bronze bell that once adorned the wall of Cohen and Ihlen’s home…
Leonard Cohen’s status as a musical and literary icon is a matter of historical record. But what the notoriously stoic poet and songwriter thought of his rise to fame remains more elusive; it was information shared only with a few intimates, Marianne Ihlen foremost among them. Over 50 letters that Cohen sent to Ihlen, his…
For all his royal trappings, Prince Charles is still a 70-year-old white man. And like many 70-year-old white men, he loves the music of the late Leonard Cohen. In a new special for BBC Radio 3’s “Private Passions,” where well-known Brits draw up playlists of songs they’ve found to be formative, the Prince of Wales…
‘So little to say / So urgent / to say it, is the whole of one poem by the late Leonard Cohen. The poem is called “My Career.” Like so much of Cohen’s work, the poem reifies a certain kind of humbleness — before the divine, the beautiful, the mystical. But the modesty may be…
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