Scholar David M. Stern has written of Cohen: "Though he was best known as a novelist and theologian, he also pursued successful careers as a highly regarded editor and publisher, as an expert collector and dealer in rare books and documents [of] twentieth-century art, and as a man of letters and cultural critic who wrote with equal authority on modern European literature, medieval Jewish mysticism, the history of Dada and surrealism, and modern typography and design.

It was during his undergraduate years at Chicago that Cohen had an intellectual crisis, which he would later describe in the widely anthologized essay, "Why I Choose to be Jewish" (1959), and that marked the rest of his life.

[4] Overall, during his university years Cohen was taught by many intellectual luminaries of the mid-century, including Joachim Wach, Paul Tillich, E. K. Brown, and Richard McKeon.

"[5]) Small as it was, Noonday Press soon had a backlist of world-class authors, such as Karl Jaspers, Louise Bogan, Machado de Assis, Sholom Aleichem, and Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Then in 1955, Cohen established Meridian Press, "a quality-paperback list," which, notably, published Hannah Arendt's revised edition of Origins of Totalitarianism.

He and his wife founded an antiquarian bookstore named Ex Libris in 1973, which "specialized in books and documents of twentieth-century art, particularly Dada, Surrealism, and early Russian Constructivism.

"[12] The business was initially run from their home, but by 1978 Ex Libris had been "moved to the ground floor of the Upper East Side Manhattan townhouse where the couple lived.

The combination of Cohen's multiple lines of work and Elaine Lustig's extensive connections in the art world resulted in their home in New York being a gathering place for influential artists, critics, scholars, and writers of the era.

Among the pair's frequent guests were Robert Motherwell, Richard Meier, Michael Graves, Cynthia Ozick, and Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi.

[15][16] Cohen wrote six works of fiction, including The Carpenter Years (1967), Acts of Theft (1980), and An Admirable Woman (1983), the last of which won the National Jewish Book Award.

In his review for the Journal for the Study of Religion, Bernard Steinberg wrote, "Cohen and Mendes-Flohr have succeeded admirably in gathering and collating a series of challenging and provocative viewpoints which in sum depict the condition of contemporary Judaism and Jewry in a most vivid manner.

Cynthia Ozick wrote in The New York Times in 1973, "For a small mountain of reasons, this book ensnares one of the most extraordinarily daring ideas to inhabit an American novel in a number of years.

Scholar Ruth Wisse has deemed In the Days of Simon Stern an example of a "midrashic mode of writing" in Jewish American literature, "one in which a familiar story or theme is given a new reading.