Sen. George McGovern, the Democratic nominee for President, has named Richard M. Cohen, associate executive director of the American Jewish Congress, to direct the nationwide effort to win Jewish votes for Sen. McGovern, Democratic campaign sources told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency yesterday. Sources close to Cohen, who has served the AJ Congress for many years as public relations director and was named associate executive director recently, said he would serve the McGovern campaign on an unpaid leave of absence.
The Democratic sources also told the JTA that a Jewish section of the McGovern campaign committee will be announced in mid-August. To date, they said, no individual has been named a head of the Jewish committee but it has been indicated informally that Sen. Abraham Ribicoff, the Connecticut Democrat who had been considered for the vice-presidential nomination, has been advising campaign managers on Jewish vote-getting and that an insurance executive, Hillel Gross, has been directing that effort in New York.
Cohen, 49, was a reporter for the New York Times after graduation from City College of New York. He worked for the Joint Distribution Committee in New York and Paris after World War II and has been with the AJ Congress for 17 years.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
