In the following excerpt, Abramson provides an overview of the major themes, characters, and narrative presentation in The Chosen.

The conflict in Chaim Potok's novel The Chosen functions at several levels. These are: the generational conflict; the temperamental; the conflict between head and heart; the opposition between a petrified fanaticism and a humane tolerance; and, finally, the split between two visions of God and man's relationship to Him. Of all of these, however, it is the opposition between the head and the heart which predominates…. Although much of the story's direction is determined by the con...

In the following review, Hicks offers praise for The Chosen, which he describes as "a fine, moving, gratifying book."

In the following review, Fuller offers high praise for The Chosen.

["The Chosen"] is Chaim Potok's first novel and—let's face it—there's something rough and unpolished about his style. Narrated in the first person by Reuven Malter, his speech rhythms are sometimes awkward, and the imagery blurred. And yet, while Reuven talks we listen because of the story he has to tell; and, long afterwards, it remains in the mind, and delights. It is like those myths that, as C. S. Lewis reminds us, do not essentially exist in words at all...

Beginning with his first novel, "The Chosen," Chaim Potok has illuminated for a vast and rightly fascinated audience the little-known and frequently misunderstood milieu of those communities of very pious Jews who live their lives in contemporary America entirely within the structure and strictures of the Old World orthodoxy of their forebears. In this dense, highly ordered, exceptionally demanding world—especially in the range of its proscriptions—Mr. Potok's brooding, pa...

[The Chosen] is a deeply considered exegesis of modern Judaism. Formally, it should be ticketed as an allegory. The plot is simple and slight, though strong and graceful: the plot carries the deadly weight of the argument through seas almost too stormy for the mind to bear. The style has a solo quality, in the sense that Charles A. Lindbergh flew alone across the Atlantic, every second in peril of death. The style is beautifully quiet and gentle. One is amazed that so frail a structure can make it into port...

"In the Beginning" seems radically different from [Potok's earlier novels, "The Chosen" and "The Promise"]. True, the shift in its locale and time period is only slight…. But he does seem to have taken up new and profoundly more complex themes. For one thing, he appears to be exploring the nature of evil in human affairs. "In the Beginning" unfolds against the background of the mounting persecution of European Jewry, first in Eastern Euro...

In the following review, Schmidt offers high praise for The Chosen.

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

["The Chosen"] starts with a rousing softball game between two Jewish parochial schools that quickly explodes into a bloody holy war. This is, unfortunately, the dramatic highpoint of the novel, and it's over by page 37. Thereafter, until an emotionally charged resolution near the very end, we have a long, earnest, somewhat affecting and sporadically fascinating tale of religious conflict and generational confrontation in which the characters never come fully alive because they are kept...

Once a man named Chaim Potok wrote a story called The Chosen. It was a good story and he told it skillfully. It was deeply evocative and called forth from the marrow of the heart certain memories of its own which still haunted the city streets of childhood. It was a story about Jews and the Jewishness of the characters, their embodiment of encounter and conflict between two ancient factions, gave to the tale an exquisite flavor of vinegar and honey; but its life and meaning derived from their humanity, whic...