Located at 342 Madison Avenue (and later on 67 Park Avenue), Schocken Books was in Midtown Manhattan, close to Grand Central Station and at the centre of the district where many other publishers, magazines and newspapers had their headquarters, and where many photo agencies (as Black Star, PIX, Rapho Guillemette, Camera Features, European Picture Service) were located. Schocken Books was part of a network of publishing houses founded by émigrés, including Pantheon Books, Oceana Publications and J. J Augustin, that made it possible for exiled authors, journalists, artists and photographers to publish their work in exile and reach an American and worldwide market.

Specialising in Judaica and Hebrew topics, Schocken Books was invested in providing support for the Jewish exile community in New York. It offered Jews an opportunity to publish books in German and English, on Jewish culture, history and heritage, and also provided a cultural home for refugees in New York and America in general. The first book to be published, in 1945, was Burning Lights, about Marc Chagall, by Bella Chagall, the painter's wife. In 1947 the first book catalogue came out featuring English translations of Franz Kafka, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Gershom Scholem, S. Y. Agnon and Walter Benjamin. Some were first published English translations.
In the same year, Polish Jews. A Pictorial Record, a photobook by the Jewish émigré photographer Roman Vishniac (with a foreword by Abraham Joshua Henschel) came out. During the 1930s Vishniac had been commissioned by the European headquarters of the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) to photograph impoverished Jewish communities throughout Eastern Europe. As taking photographs in the public space was often forbidden, Vishniac posed as a sales representative and took his photographs with a hidden camera. More than once, he was arrested on suspicion of espionage. The photographs he took show people, usually in small groups, going about their daily business, often reading religious texts, sometimes just sitting and staring impassively. Today, it is the largest photographic document of the persecution of Jews before the Holocaust.

Salman Schocken already had experience in the publishing field. In 1931, in Berlin, he established Schocken Verlag with the aim of supporting Jewish literature. Schocken was able to publish the work of such Jewish writers as Franz Kafka, Leo Baeck, Gershom Scholem, Franz Rosenzweig, Kurt Wolfskehl and Ludwig Strauss (Abel 2009, 202). These writers were also published in the Bücherei des Schocken Verlags series – a series of inexpensive books with Jewish authors or themes, published in Germany between November 1933 and 1939. Schocken was forced to emigrate in 1934 to Tel Aviv, where he set up the Schocken Publishing House, while his business in Berlin was managed by Lambert Schneider until 1938, when Nazi censorship forced it to close. With the help of international contacts, he managed to smuggle all his book stock out of Germany. In 1940 Schocken arrived in New York and restarted his publishing house in 1945. It is not known if Schocken received financial help from any institutions, as was the case for Pantheon Books, or whether he had enough money of his own to restart his business in America. While offering contemporary exiled Jewish authors a chance to publish their work in New York, he also oversaw English translations of books by German Jews, giving them a new audience in America. Furthermore, he collaborated with émigrés photographers, as for example Lotte Jacobi, who created portraits for book publications. The first editor at Schocken was Nahum Glatzer, who was followed by Hannah Arendt, who had her own network of exiled and American intellectuals at the New School for Social Research. Schocken Books has been part of Random House, Inc. since 1987.