Cohen was born in Congress Poland, part of the Russian Empire, to a Jewish family on May 11, 1868.

[3] In 1888, he entered the firm of Lee & Cohen in Montreal; later became partner with his father in the firm of L. Cohen & Son; in 1895, he established W. R. Cuthbert & Co; in 1900, he organized the Canadian Improvement Co., a dredging contractor; in 1906, he founded The Freedman Co. in Montreal; and in May 1919, he organized and became President of Canadian Export Clothiers, Ltd.[3] The Freedman Company went on to become one of Montreal’s largest clothing companies.

[5] The newspaper promoted the Canadianization of recent East European Jewish immigrants and encouraged their acceptance of Canadian customs[4] as Cohen felt that the Old World customs of immigrant Jews were one of the main causes of anti-Semitism.

[4] In 1914, the paper was purchased by Hirsch Wolofsky, owner of the Yiddish-language Keneder Adler, who transformed it into the Canadian Jewish Chronicle.

[5] Cohen was also a leader of the Young Men’s Hebrew Benevolent Society (later the Baron de Hirsch Institute) and the United Talmud Torahs, a Jewish day school in Montreal.