His parents, Stella and Isaac Freeman, were Jewish and lived in the Pale of Settlement as per anti-semitic laws of the Tsarist regime.
Freeman and Chambers signed a petition with colleagues (including Sender Garlin, Vern Smith, and John Loomis Sherman) that asked the Central Committee of the Communist Party to have Louis Engdahl removed as editor.
In 1929, he succeeded his brother at TASS and lived with his wife Vera Schaap (wife of Al Schaap, a Young Communist League founder) and his brother Joseph in an apartment on Henry Street in Brooklyn Heights, rented from Eugene Lyons (formerly with TASS, by then with United Press correspondent in Moscow).
Chambers recalled Freeman's guests included Sender Garlin, Abe Magill, James S. Allen, Joseph North (of the Daily Worker and New Masses), Anna Rochester, Grace Hutchins, Nadya Pavlov, and Kenneth Durant.
)[5] Freeman also worked at the Brooklyn Daily Eagle newspaper and the New Masses magazine (where his brother Joseph had succeeded as editor-in-chief not long after Chambers entered the Soviet Underground).