Lewis Cohen

100 Years From Mississippi

Mamie Lang Kirkland still remembers the night in 1915 when panic filled her home in Ellisville, Mississippi. Her family was forced to flee in darkness from a growing mob of men determined to lynch her father and his friend. Mamie’s family escaped, but her father’s friend, John Hartfield, did not. He suffered one of the most horrific lynchings of the era. Mamie vowed to never return to Mississippi – until now. After one hundred years, Mamie’s youngest child, filmmaker, Tarabu Betserai Kirkland, takes his mother back to Ellisville to tell her story, honor those who succumbed to the terror of racial violence, and give testimony to the courage and hope epitomized by many of her generation

Jews and Money: Investigation of a Myth

Filmmaker Lewis Cohen intelligently explores the origins and evolution of the myth of the wealthy Jew. In 2006, Ilan Halimi, a French Jewish salesman is lured to the outskirts of Paris where he is kidnapped and later murdered by criminal gang who had demanded a half-million euro ransom on the assumption that 'all Jews are rich'. Jews & Money is a probe into the myth about Jews, and where and when it took root. Why is the Jew so often cast as the banker or trader, pawnbroker or movie mogul? Of all the medieval moneylenders, why is only Shylock remembered? How did the Rothschilds become the symbols of international capitalism? And why does a simple cell phone salesman get pegged as rich, and die for it?