SOURCE: "Trying to Be Jewish," in Times Literary Supplement, August 31, 1967, p. 777.

In the following excerpt, the critic gives a favorable assessment of The Chosen.

Three more novels [Potok's The Chosen, Martin Yoseloff's A Time to be Young, and Charles Elliott's The Minority Man] to add in one way or another to the growing literature of Jewish self-exploration and self-definition, personal and national….

By far the most distinguished of the three, and that in a totally unexpected and unfashionable way, is The Chosen. We are back in New York, this time during and just after the last war. But instead of the search for a new identity amid the slipping faith and lax observance of Murray Ziegler's suburbia there is the fanaticism of the far-out Hasidic sect, which has survived almost unchanged since its establishment in eighteenth-century Poland. It is the story of a friendship between two boys: Reuven...