Dr. Janice Cohn was inspired to write The Christmas Menorahs: How a Town Fought Hate after reading an article in The New York Times in 1994 and traveling to Billings, Montana, to find out what happened there. Convinced that the story is as timely today as it was thirty years ago, Dr. Cohn chose to reissue the original book with the addition of extra material to tell the world the story of Billings again and to motivate all of us to become upstanders in the face of injustice.

Dr. Cohn is a psychotherapist who specializes in helping adults and children cope with grief, loss, and life transitions. ​Her former newspaper column for the Family Times section of The Washington Times, which focused on raising compassionate children, ran for over two years and reached approximately half a million people. She is a former presidential faculty appointee to the Columbia University Continuing Education Seminar on Death and Dying, and former chairperson of the Multidisciplinary Bereavement Committee of Newark Beth Israel Medical Center.

​Dr. Cohn has served as a special consultant to the Family Division of the New Jersey Superior Court in Ocean County, New Jersey, focusing on the emotional needs of children and parents during the process of separation and divorce. In conjunction with this project, she has written an educational handbook, Surviving the Pain of Divorce and Separation: 8 Steps for Parents and Children, which has been distributed throughout the state via the family court system.

​Dr. Cohn's book I Had a Friend Named Peter: Talking to Children About the Death of a Friend (William Morrow, 1987) has been cited for excellence by a number of educational organizations and has received critical praise from publications such as The New York Times Book Review and School Library Journal. Her second book, Why Did It Happen? Helping Children Cope in a Violent World (Morrow, 1994), was chosen as a selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club and has been praised by School Library Journal and Publishers Weekly, among other publications. A third book, Molly's Rosebush (Albert Whitman, 1994), which deals with a young child's reaction to her mother’s miscarriage, was praised by School Library Journal, Booklist, and renowned pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton, who called the book “charming and very insightful.”