October 18: Mayor of Amsterdam

Job Cohen, the progressive mayor of Amsterdam from 2001 to 2010 and the world’s first public official to conduct same-sex marriages (on April 1, 2001), was born in Haarlem in the Netherlands on this date in 1947. Cohen’s paternal grandparents died in Bergen-Belsen; his parents were in hiding during the war years and were among the early members of the social democratic Labour Party, founded in 1946 and now the second largest political party in the Netherlands. Cohen served as state secretary for education and sciences in the 1990s, and state secretary for justice from 1998 until his appointment as mayor. In 2005, Mayor Cohen successfully preserved peace and goodwill following the vicious murder by a Muslim assassin of filmmaker Theo van Gogh. Cohen promoted dialogue among the city’s varied ethnic and religious groups (nearly half of Amsterdam’s residents are not of Dutch descent) and actively used his office to dampen the sources of radicalization among Muslims in his country. He was mocked by the anti-Muslim political leader Geert Wilders as “tea-drinking, multiculti-coddling Cohen” -- but Time magazine awarded him the title “European Hero” for 2005 for his inclusive approach towards the Muslim community.

“Cohen remains in many ways a traditional European leftist. He favors substantial government support of the arts and sees abortion as a woman’s right; he wants to remove tax rebates for the wealthy and to get Dutch troops out of Afghanistan by December.” —Russell Shorto, New York Times, 2010