Dr. Jonathan Cohen, an Israeli-born scholar, was appointed Assistant Professor in Talmud and Halakhic Literature at HUC-JIR, Cincinnati, in July 1998, and Director of the Hebrew Union College-University of Cincinnati Center for the Study of Ethics and Contemporary Moral Problems in January 2000. In November 2003, he was awarded the Rabbi Michael Matuson Professorship for Emerging Scholars, and he was named Affiliate Member of the Laboratoire Des etudes sur les Monothéismes of the French CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research) in August 2005.

Dr. Cohen's interests include history of law, law and religion, and, in particular, the evolution of Jewish law in Christian Europe. He read law at the University of Kent, Canterbury, and earned his Ph.D. (Law) from the University of Liverpool. His research focused on the evolution of restitution as a civil remedy in medieval Jewish law. At the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies he was the first David Patterson Junior Fellow in Jewish Law.

He has recently written on the status of married women in bigamous Jewish households, on the evolution of Jewish welfare law, on rabbinic perceptions of Jewish solidarity, and on Jewish law and modernity. Dr. Cohen is currently editing a volume of studies in Jewish commercial law that will be published by the Jewish Law Association, and is writing on the development of halakhic writing and reasoning.