Ken Cohen, Alav HaShalom

I lost one of the most important people in my life a day or so ago. My dear friend, Ken Cohen, succumbed to a vile illness which took him from us all too soon. I met Ken when he enrolled in a Biblical Hebrew course I taught on the campus of Stanford University, around the Fall of 1984. The course was not from Stanford itself, but rather Lehrhaus Judaica, a school for adult Jewish Studies, which began at Berkeley and expanded to teach evening classes on many campuses all over the San Francisco Bay Area. 

For reasons I could not explain today, during one of my classes I mentioned that I was having trouble with tracking the students because the database program on the  personal computer I was using was pretty worthless. After class, Ken approached me and asked if I was interested in trying a real database. He explained that he was a marketing manager at the Oracle Corporation, and they had just released a version of the program for IBM PC. I enthusiastically agreed and next class Ken brought a knapsack loaded with a dozen floppy discs and about 20 pounds of computer manuals. 

Ken later told me that he procured the license for Berkeley Hillel Foundation (which housed Lehrhaus) by asking Larry Ellison to sign off on the gift. Larry asked why Oracle should gift anything to Hillel and Ken replied words to the effect, “Well you let Kennedy (another VP) give a license to the whole Mormon Church, so surely I can give one to one Jewish foundation.” Ellison replied, “OK, but make sure this guy doesn’t take too much time from our support department.” On one of the few calls I did make to the support department, the tech told me that there was a note on my file that said, “Do everything you can to help Jack Love with anything he needs.” The story of what I did with Oracle belongs elsewhere on my blog, so some day…

Ken took early retirement from Oracle a year or so later and moved to the East Bay where we became fast friends. Terri and I enjoyed Shabbat dinners with him and his wife Julie. Ken continued his studies at Berkeley’s Graduate Theological Union and received an M.A. from the Center for Judaic Studies. He began teaching at the Lehrhaus, and also joined the Board of Directors. He served as the President of the Board for several years. 

When Terri received her appointment to the faculty of the University of Michigan, she preceded me to Ann Arbor by a month. After I finished closing down our Berkeley home, I loaded up the car and headed off to Ann Arbor with my dog Lucy in back. And Ken was in the passenger seat to accompany me across country. We had a great time on that trip! A few years later, Ken flew into Ann Arbor to be with me at Ephraim’s Brit Milah. The two of us chanted the blessings as my family physician did the honors. 

In a way, I owe my career at U of Michigan to Ken. When I arrived in Ann Arbor, as the spouse of a new faculty member the University was supposed to help me find a job. I was ushered into the office of the head of staff employment who gave me a great pep talk, then showed me outside his office to the job board. That resulted in precisely nothing. A couple of months after arrival, Ken mailed me a T-shirt emblazoned with the word “Oracle.” I wore the T-shirt one day while picking Shoshana up from the Pound House Children’s Center. I felt a tap on my shoulder and when I turned around, a father picking his own child up asked me if I knew anything about Oracle. I said that indeed, I was skilled in using it and had developed several databases. He replied, “We (meaning University of Michigan IT) have purchased a campus site license for Oracle, but no one knows how to use it, would you be interested in speaking to us about it?” I replied that I’d love to. After the two sessions I led on programming SQL (Oracle’s language) John asked me if I’d like to have a job. And for the next 23 years or so, I led technology groups at the University of Michigan, first at ITD, then at Engineering, and finishing up back in ITD. But I never would have had that career without Ken’s gifts. 

We got together occasionally since then whenever I had the opportunity to revisit the SF Bay Area, but in recent years I haven’t seen much of him. He was busy teaching at Lehrhaus and taking care of his three children, so the inevitable happened and I lost track of him. 

Ken passed away this week after a year-long battle with lung cancer. May his name be reckoned as a blessing, and may he be kept alive in our memories. 

Praised is the True Judge.