Selma Jeanne Cohen (September 18, 1920 – December 23, 2005) was a dance historian, editor, and teacher who devoted her career to advocating dance as an art worthy of the same scholarly respect traditionally awarded to painting, music, and literature. She edited the six-volume International Encyclopedia of Dance, completed in 1998.
Born in Chicago, Illinois, she was a dance critic for the New York Times and the Saturday Review. She also wrote and edited several books and taught at many colleges, including the University of Chicago. She died of Alzheimer’s disease in Greenwich Village, New York on December 23, 2005, aged 85.
Cohen was the niece of Benjamin V. Cohen, a key figure in the administrations of United States Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman.
Famous quotes containing the words jeanne and/or cohen:
“May we not assure ourselves that whatever woman’s thought and study shall embrace will thereby receive a new inspiration, that she will save science from materialism, and art from a gross realism; that the “eternal womanly shall lead upward and onward”?”
—Louisa Parsons Hopkins, U.S. scientist and author. As quoted in The Fair Women, ch. 16, by Jeanne Madeline Weimann (1981)
“History is a needle
for putting men asleep
anointed with the poison
Of all they want to keep.”
—Leonard Cohen (b. 1934)