Chaim Potok

Chaim Potok was a Jewish philosophy, religion and fiction author best known for his debut novel “The Chosen.” The author was born in 1929 to Polish Jewish immigrants Mollie Friedman and Benjamin Max Potok. His father had come to the US a decade before the Great Depression and started a stationery selling business. After the Great Depression struck, he changed careers and started selling jewelry. The Potok patriarch raised his children in the Orthodox Jewish tradition and his brother would ultimately graduate as a rabbi and his two sisters are now married to rabbis. Just like many young men raised Orthodox, he attended parochial school such as the Talmudic Academy of Yeshiva College. While he loved his culture and religion growing up, Potok always felt that there was a larger world outside the Jewish one out there that he needed to experience. He documented this in Culture Confrontation in Urban America his very popular essay. He was soon having issues with his Jewish world as he strived to embrace the outside world which he found in music, movies and books that appealed to his senses and his mind.