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Chaim Potok was born in New York City in 1929. He graduated from Yeshiva University and the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, was ordained as a rabbi, and earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania. He also served as editor of the Jewish Publication Society of America. Potok’s first novel, The Chosen, published in 1967, received the Edward Lewis Wallant Memorial Book Award and was nominated for the National Book Award. He is author of eight novels, including In the Beginning and My Name is Asher Lev, and Wanderings, a history of the Jews. He died in 2002.

Cynthia Ozick (born 1928 in New York City) is a towering figure in Jewish‑American literature, celebrated for her intellectually fierce novels, short stories, and essays that probe identity, memory, morality, and the burdens of history; raised in the Bronx by Russian Jewish immigrants and shaped by her early devotion to Henry James, she built a seven‑decade career marked by works such as The Pagan Rabbi, The Shawl, The Puttermesser Papers, and Heir to the Glimmering World, earning major literary honors while becoming one of the most distinctive moral and aesthetic voices in American letters.

Dara Horn is an acclaimed American novelist and scholar whose fiction explores Jewish history, memory, and the stories people inherit and reinvent. She holds a PhD in Hebrew and Yiddish literature from Harvard University and has taught Jewish literature and Israeli culture at Harvard and Sarah Lawrence College. Her debut novel, In the Image (2002), was followed by The World to Come (2006), All Other Nights (2009), A Guide for the Perplexed (2013), and Eternal Life (2018). Her novels range from a Chagall-inspired mystery involving a stolen painting, to the story of a Jewish Union spy during the Civil War, to an immortal woman who has lived through millennia of Jewish history. Her work often draws on rabbinic tradition, lost Jewish texts, and the long arc of Jewish survival. Horn has received the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction, the Harold U. Ribalow Prize, and the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. Granta named her one of the Best Young American Novelists. Her nonfiction book People Love Dead Jews (2021), a collection of essays on how the world engages with Jewish history and antisemitism, was a bestseller. Her essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, and Smithsonian. She lives in New Jersey with her family.

The Edward Lewis Wallant Award is one of the oldest and most distinguished Jewish literary prizes in the United States. Established in 1963 at the University of Hartford by Dr. and Mrs. Irving Waltman of West Hartford, Connecticut, the award honors the memory of novelist Edward Lewis Wallant (1926–1962), author of The Human Season and The Pawnbroker — the latter adapted into a landmark film that was among the first to depict the inside of a Nazi concentration camp on screen. Presented annually, the award recognizes a writer — preferably one not yet widely recognized — whose published work of fiction is judged to hold significance for American Jewish history and culture. A panel of four literary critics serves as judges, seeking out authors whose work shares a kinship with Wallant's own: fiction marked by moral seriousness, human intimacy, and insight into the Jewish American experience.

Howard Jacobson (born 1942, Manchester) is among the most celebrated comic novelists in Britain, and arguably the foremost chronicler of Jewish life in contemporary English fiction. Raised in a Jewish family in Prestwich, north Manchester, and educated at Downing College, Cambridge, where he studied under F. R. Leavis, he taught English at universities in Australia and Britain before turning to writing full time. The tension between the lecture hall’s moral seriousness and the comedian’s irreverence has animated his work ever since. Jacobson’s fiction returns again and again to what it means to be Jewish in a country that is at once tolerant and quietly unsettling. His early novels, including Coming from Behind (1983), Peeping Tom (1984) and The Mighty Walzer (1999), draw on his Manchester boyhood and use sex, sport, and academic failure as vehicles for comedy. The Mighty Walzer, whose hero is a table-tennis prodigy, remains a beloved portrait of postwar Jewish suburban life, with its aspirations, embarrassments, and fierce family loyalties. His reputation was transformed by The Finkler Question (2010), which won the Man Booker Prize, the first comic novel to do so in decades. Its characters, the widowed Julian Treslove, a gentile who longs to be Jewish, and his friends Sam Finkler and Libor Sevcik, allow Jacobson to explore Jewish identity, Zionism, anti-Zionism, grief, and the peculiar British habit of defining Jews from the outside. The novel is notable for its portrayal of “ASHamed Jews,” a group of Jewish public figures who disavow Israel, and for its wry insistence that Jewishness is lived not only as a religion or politics but as temperament, argument, and inheritance. Later works have taken a darker, more searching turn. Kalooki Nights (2006), shortlisted for the Man Booker, mixes cartooning, Manchester Jewish family life, and the long shadow of the Holocaust, examining how a community absorbs catastrophe. Zoo Time (2012) satirises the literary world while reflecting on Jewish male anxiety and the decline of the novel. J (2014), a dystopian fable about an unnamed catastrophe that has been erased from public memory, meditates on historical silence and the persistence of prejudice, and was longlisted for the Man Booker. Shylock Is My Name (2016), written for the Hogarth Shakespeare series, reimagines The Merchant of Venice and confronts questions of mercy, revenge, and fatherhood through a modern Shylock figure. Live a Little (2019) and Pussycat (2025), among his later novels, continue his preoccupation with ageing, desire, and mortality. Across these books certain values recur: a love of argument as a form of devotion, suspicion of sentimentality and ideological purity, a belief that humour is a serious moral instrument, and an abiding curiosity about the uneasy, tender, and often absurd relationship between Jews and the world around them. His characters are frequently lonely, lustful, self-lacerating, and funny, and they are rarely allowed the comfort of easy answers. Jacobson is also an essayist and broadcaster, and his non-fiction, notably Seriously Funny and Whatever It Is, I Don’t Like It, as well as his journalism, has further established him as a vigorous voice on antisemitism, free speech, and the comic tradition. His work is often compared to that of Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Kingsley Amis, yet his voice remains distinctively his own: Jewish, English, and unapologetically both.

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1903–1991) was a Yiddish-language novelist, short-story writer, and memoirist, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978. Born in Leoncin, Poland, and raised in Warsaw’s Krochmalna Street, he grew up in a rabbinic household steeped in Hasidic piety, Talmudic study, and the ordinary dramas of a crowded Jewish neighborhood. That upbringing, along with the influence of his older brother, the novelist I. J. Singer, became the wellspring of his art. Singer wrote in Yiddish throughout his career, even as the world that spoke it was destroyed. He emigrated to New York in 1935 and spent decades writing for the Forverts (Jewish Daily Forward), where much of his fiction first appeared in serial form before being translated into English, often in collaboration with others and himself. His work became a living record of the Eastern European Jewish world, from the shtetl and the Hasidic court to the tenements of Warsaw and the cafeterias of Manhattan. His fiction engages Jewish history and belief with unusual breadth. The Family Moskat traces the assimilation and decline of a Warsaw Jewish family on the eve of the Holocaust. The Manor and The Estate follow Jewish life through the upheavals of nineteenth-century Poland. Satan in Goray explores the messianic frenzy that followed the Chmielnicki massacres and the false messiah Sabbatai Zevi. The Slave and Enemies, A Love Story wrestle with faith, survival, and the long shadow of catastrophe. In stories such as “Gimpel the Fool” and “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy,” he gave voice to fools, skeptics, rebels, and mystics alike. Singer’s characters inhabit the tension between tradition and modernity, piety and desire, divine order and human chaos. Dybbuks, demons, and imps move through his pages alongside rabbis, scholars, matchmakers, and secular intellectuals, reflecting both Jewish folk belief and his own restless questioning of God, free will, and suffering. Yet his work is also deeply attentive to Jewish values: the moral weight of choice, the demands of compassion, the durability of faith, and the stubborn dignity of ordinary people. He also wrote beloved children’s stories drawn from Jewish folklore and holiday traditions, and a memoir, In My Father’s Court, that evokes his childhood among the Jews of Warsaw. Singer remains a defining voice of Jewish literature, a writer who preserved a vanished world in its own language while asking questions that speak to readers everywhere.

Michael Chabon (born 1963, Washington, D.C.) is one of the most celebrated American novelists of his generation, and Jewish history, identity, and imagination run through much of his best-known work. His Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) follows two Jewish cousins, one a refugee from Nazi-occupied Prague, who create comic-book heroes in 1940s New York; it joins the immigrant experience, the Holocaust’s shadow, and the Golem legend with the birth of American popular culture. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), a hard-boiled detective story set in an alternate-history Jewish settlement in Sitka, Alaska, imagines a Yiddish-speaking homeland that never lasted, and it won the Hugo, Nebula, and Sidewise Awards. Other works return to Jewish themes, among them the essay collection Maps and Legends, the novella The Final Solution, the novel Telegraph Avenue, which explores Black-Jewish relations and shared cultural ground in Oakland, and the family memoir Moonglow. Throughout, Chabon writes about exile, inheritance, memory, and the question of what it means to belong. Chabon has also been an active public voice on Jewish literary culture, and he has argued for a renewed, playful engagement with Yiddish language and tradition and for the creative possibilities of Jewish storytelling. His other honors include the Michael L. Printz Award for Young Adult Literature (for Summerland’s companion recognition in the field, as well as a National Jewish Book Award), and he is a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife, the writer Ayelet Waldman.