Every once and awhile a book concept hooks you in the first sentence. Such was the case with Benyamin Cohen‘s My Jesus Year. “One day a Georgia-born son of an Orthodox rabbi discovers that his enthusiasm for Judaism is flagging. He observes the Sabbath, he goes to synagogue, and he even flies to New York on weekends for a series of ‘speed dates’ with nice, eligible Jewish girls. But, something is missing. Looking out of his window and across the street at one of the hundreds of churches in Atlanta, he asks, ‘What would it be like to be a Christian?’ … So begins Benyamin Cohen’s hilarious journey that is My Jesus Year — part memoir, part spiritual quest, and part anthropologist’s mission.” Next month the book will be released in paperback. With that in mind, I recently email interviewed him. My thanks to Cohen for his time and to Kelly Hughes of DeChant-Hughes & Assoc Inc. for arranging it.

Tim O’Shea: What was the hardest part of the journey for you, both in terms of the actual experience and/or writing about it?

Benyamin Cohen: The hardest part of the journey for me was when I went to Confession: The entire year, wherever I went, I let people know I was Jewish. But at Confession, since technically only Catholics are allowed, I had to pretend to be someone else. And I’m not an actor. The other hard part about Confession was that it was an audience of one. At all the other churches, I could sit in the back and be a fly on the wall, watching what was going on and taking notes. But in the confines of the Confession booth, it was just me and the priest. Scary stuff.

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