(JEWISH GROUP) Greenland's only Jew hears a familiar pattern in Trump's annexation talk [View all]

[Behind the Aegis]

Paul Cohen is, as far as he knows, the only Jew in Greenland. There is no synagogue, no minyan, and the island’s latitude itself seems to reject the natural rhythms of Jewish life, with long days and nights refusing to demarcate the Jewish Sabbath in any familiar way. When Cohen tells Greenlanders that he is Jewish, the reaction is indifference. “It’s as if I were telling them that I brush my teeth twice a day. It’s like, OK — tell me something interesting,” he told the Forward.

Cohen, who moved to the southern town of Narsaq with his wife, Monika, 25 years ago and works as a translator, describes himself as culturally Jewish. Still, he feels he is “standing on the shoulders, perhaps intellectually and culturally, of all the generations of Jews who’ve come before me.”

Now, Cohen’s identity has taken on new weight as President Donald Trump has revived talk of the United States annexing Greenland, a move that Cohen hears through his knowledge of Europe’s darkest chapters of the 20th century.

During his first term, Trump floated the idea of purchasing the island, which is an autonomous territory of Denmark. Despite the fact that 85% of Greenlanders oppose the idea of annexation, Trump again raised the idea this week, framing it as a matter of national security and citing Russian and Chinese activity in the Arctic. To Cohen, however, Trump’s rhetoric sounds less like a national security strategy than something older and more dangerous.

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