Vardina Cohen

Origins and early life

Vardina Cohen, born in Givatayim in 1961, is the youngest child of the singers Shlomo Cohen — Suleiman the Great — and Sara Cohen, and the sister of the singers Hofni, Pini and Izhar Cohen.

Work and career

She studied classical piano, served in the Nahal entertainment company, took a degree in music education and went on to study theatre and acting at Tel Aviv University; as a student in the 1980s she sang backing vocals on Yardena Arazi's shows. She appeared in the 1984 film Kasach alongside her brother Hofni, sang Lecha Dodi at the Hasidic Song Festival in 1985, and in 1987 competed in the Israeli Eurovision heat with Izhar, singing his Music Is a Kiss Forever, which came fifth; she returned to the heat in 1989 with The Golden Path.

Her first album, Travelling in the Wake of Love, came out in 1988, written, composed and arranged in full by Danny Robas, and its title song remains the one she is known by; that same year she took over the social worker's role in the musical Salah Shabati. A second album, Through Myself, followed in 1990, with A City Without Mercy to words by Yehonatan Geffen.

Personal life

In 1991 she married the musician Tzur Ben Zeev and followed him to the United States, where their eldest children were born, and came home to Israel in 1996; her third album went double gold, and from 2006 she made a series of children's records that teach the country's heritage and festivals through song. In 2015 she recorded Songs from Home, the Land of Israel repertoire of her parents' house — the shepherds' medley, the hora medley, the songs around the campfire — produced by her husband.