Arthur Allen Cohen was an American Jewish scholar, art critic, theologian, publisher, and author.
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 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."
Born in New York City in 1928, Arthur Allen Cohen was the son of Isidore Meyer and Bess Junger Cohen, both second-generation Americans. Though he would not publish his first novel until the age of 39, he told Thomas Lask in 1980, "I've actually been writing fiction since I was very young. [...] I always wrote stories." Cohen entered University of Chicago at the age of 16, where he received his B.A. in 1946. 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. Confronted with the thoroughgoing Christianity of Western culture, and reading highly influential Christian literature, Cohen considered becoming a Christian. However, he was soon put in contact with Milton Steinberg, a leading Jewish thinker, who set him on a course of Jewish education which brought him to a deeper relationship with his heritage and ended his interest in converting.
In 1949 Cohen earned his M.A. in philosophy at University of Chicago with a thesis on Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. He then briefly studied at both Hebrew University and Union Theological Seminary, before beginning doctoral work at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, where he studied medieval Jewish philosophy. In 1951, however, Cohen, "who found it insulated and unexciting compared to Chicago," left the seminary without completing his PhD. 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.
Though his intellectual legacy rests on his books, Cohen never earned his livelihood in academic settings, nor did he support himself on his writings alone. In 1951, after leaving the Jewish Theological Seminary, he and his friend Cecil Hemley co-founded Noonday Press. (It was later asserted by Hemley's wife that Cohen "was there for his money, not his talent." ) 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. Mainly focusing on reprints, books like Jacques Maritain's Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry and Constantin Stanislavski's My Life in Art sold especially well. Yet the 1950s were the heyday of quality paperback presses, and Meridian competed fiercely with larger presses in the field, notably Doubleday and New American Library of World Literature. In 1960, Cohen sold Meridian Press to World Publishing, where he was also, briefly, an editor.
In the early 1950s, Cohen met the woman he would later marry, Elaine Lustig (née Firstenberg). She and her husband, the graphic designer Alvin Lustig, had moved to New York in 1951. During this time Alvin taught at Yale University and designed covers for New Directions. Following Alvin's death in 1955, Cohen, a close friend of the couple, "suggested that [Elaine] design the book covers Alvin had originally been hired to produce" for Meridian. It was through this working relationship that they became more involved. In 1956, Elaine and Cohen married; they remained married until his death in 1986. The couple lived in Manhattan during these years.
Cohen served as an editor for several publishers over the years, including his own. After working as an editor for World Publishing, he was hired by Holt, Rinehart & Winston in 1961 as "religious-books editor," and then became editor-in-chief in 1964. In addition to his publishing and editing work, Cohen collected rare books. 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." 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." Elaine finally closed Ex Libris in 1998.
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.

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