Chaim Potok, rabbi and critical scholar of Judaic texts, has demonstrated in his literary career that the American novel is indeed a viable genre for writing about Jewish theology, liturgy, history, and scholarship. He has brought to American fiction a...

Chaim Potok "wrote of what he knew best, Jewish-Americans in the 20th century struggling with two contradictory yet valid points of view," according to Shirley Saad writing for the United Press International. In such popular and award-winning books as...

Today is Monday, July 23, the 204th day of 2007. There are 161 days left in the year.Today's Highlight in History:On July 23, 1967, a week of deadly race-related rioting that claimed 43 lives erupted in Detroit.On this date:In 1885, Ulysses S. Grant, the 18th...

Who We Are: On Being (and Not Being) a Jewish American Writer, edited by Derek Rubin. Schocken Books, 348 pages, $25.When I entered college, in the mid-1960's, my freshman class was asked to read two books over the summer: Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King...

In the following essay, Kremer explores themes and issues surrounding anti-Semitism and the Holocaust in Potok's fiction. According to Kremer, rather than "focus on the atrocities of the Holocaust period and burden of Holocaust survival, Potok generally concentrates on the possibilities of Holocaust restoration."

In the following essay, Timmerman examines the tension among individuality, personal growth, and the force of tradition in Potok's fiction.

Chaim Potok in The Book of Lights has adapted his by now standard structure to the story of yet another mild Jewish insubordinate. In each of Potok's previous novels, a representative of Jewish tradition comes into conflict with some incursion of modernity—psychology, comparative philology, art—and makes the perilous move to the other side. His present hero moves from the accepted province of talmudic law to the Kabbalah, the source of a more mysterious, and currently more fashionable, ...

Chaim Potok uses a protagonist to protray his themes through his writing to the reader. The piece of prose acts as a type of guide for the moral issue of beginnings, as Potok gives examples of how beginnings are hard, but by using the structure in his piece and the flashback stories Potok also tries to portray that although one"cannot swallow all the world at one time","we survive our beginnings."