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, ...

In the following review, Reed discusses Davita's Harp, Potok's early literary career, and reception of his fiction in the Jewish community.

In the following review, Shribman offers high praise for The Gates of November, which the critic describes as a "gripping" story.

In the following review, Abrahamson finds shortcomings in I Am the Clay, citing Potok's "unsuccessful foray into the realm of existentialist thought" and his simplistic appeal for Christian love.

In the following review, Barringer praises The Gates of November as a "fascinating" tale, though finds shortcomings in Potok's overreaching history of Soviet Jewry.

The novelist's hand is evident in the flow of the narrative and the often felicitous turns of phrase [in Wanderings: Chaim Potok's History of the Jews]. Despite the fact that it is not the work of a historian, it is sophisticated and judicious in its use of professional sources. Yet as the title makes clear, this is meant as a personal history, and its personal character is emphasized through the deliberate intrusion of the author into the narrative. (p. 84) This sort of thing has a purpose: t...

In the following review, Reed offers a favorable assessment of The Book of Lights.

In the following review, Cheyette finds fault with Potok's limited knowledge of Korea and "didacticism" in I Am the Clay.

To read Chaim Potok's Wanderings, a superbly written … history of the Jews, is to understand why [the] theme of vengeance is so much a part of Jewish history. It also serves to remind that, though the major event of Christianity celebrates birth and love, and Judaism the memory of slaughter and vengeance, both have often practised in each other's territory…. [Wanderings is] the story of civilization—as it affects his people. Explains Potok: "Though I had studied his...

One cannot resist the temptation to observe without being facetious that as a historian, Potok solidifies his reputation as a fine novelist. Claiming no credentials as a historian, using hundreds of eminent sources and texts in several languages which he appreciatively acknowledges, he has fashioned an intelligent, thorough and credible one-volume chronicle [Wanderings] that breathes with a passion that is more common to fiction than to history. It takes a writer with a flair for imagery, for example, to vi...

Chaim Potok has not written a scholarly history of the Jews. No one person could possibly do that…. But what Potok has done [in Wanderings] is to dramatize all of Jewish history and bring it to life, as only a novelist could. He has done his homework well and has gone to the scholars…. But after that, he has done something more, something they could not do, which is to make the bare bones of their scholarship come alive. He has made of Jewish history real theatre. He describes each period in d...

In the Beginning relates the changing fortunes and attitudes of the Luries, a Jewish family living in the Bronx. In particular it is the story of David, the narrator, and of the shaping of his character and vocation by the influences among which he grows up…. Chaim Potok has remarkable gifts of recall. He catches beautifully the atmosphere of a family party or a school quarrel. Rarer than this is the skill with which he shows how what a child learns and what it experiences are fused and transformed b...

In the following review, the critic finds shortcomings in Wanderings but marks the presence of "occasionally brilliant" passages.

In the Beginning, Chaim Potok's fourth novel, is again about urban life, about a young Jewish boy growing up in New York City and experiencing the strains that modern, assimilationist America can put upon a deeply religious, orthodox sensibility…. [Many] of the dramatic tensions in the novel develop through Max Lurie's active leadership in a society to help others emigrate to America. But the primary one derives from young David's situation in an environment that cherishes the ol...

Babylonian chroniclers wrote, in two columns, the histories of Assyria and Babylonia side by side; during their captivity in Babylonia, Jewish scribes adopted the practice as they synchronized the histories of Judah and Israel. In a way, Chaim Potok now has done the same thing [in Wanderings], matching the reigns of Abraham and Saul and David to the advancing civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, and tracing the movements of the Hebrew peoples eventually through the development of Islam and Chr...

Chaim Potok's previous novel, "My Name Is Asher Lev," was about a young painter torn between religion and art. His new novel ["In the Beginning"], about a gifted Bronx boy who becomes a Biblical scholar, suggests that the author has decided in favor of religion. The book has an ascetic, stoical, almost self-punishing tone, established with its first line, "All beginnings are hard," and sustained through the painful and sometimes repetitious actions of the sto...

The many lights in Chaim Potok's "Book of Lights" shine with allegorical splendor. In his descriptions of tenement fires in a decaying Brooklyn neighborhood, the flash of the first atomic bombs at Alamogordo and Hiroshima, and the "light that is God" of mystical Jewish texts, Potok writes of luminous truths and darkly threatening evils….

The Book of Lights is set in the 1950s…. [Its] core is the hero's inner development. His questing nature is shown by his choice of a non-orthodox seminary, his first step away from safety and certainty, and his interest lies rather with the Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical writings, than with the safer Talmud…. Isaac Bashevis Singer has given the occult element in life a poetic resonance, be it in the Polish shtetl before the holocaust or among the survivors in America. Potok is alive to t...

Potok has accomplished an amazing work [in Wanderings]: he has given us a long, well-researched history of the Jewish people, yet he does so with a narrative that is very personal and human. If he seems to scan centuries leaving gaps in the history, he does so because as a self-imposed editor, he must give space to the more important aspects of history which demand space. If he does not know how certain things happened, he offers the reader his own conjecture on the events, and how they came about. He inclu...