Samuel G. Freedman is an award-winning author, columnist, and professor. A columnist for The New York Times and a professor at Columbia University, he is the author of the six acclaimed books, most recently Who She Was: My Search for My Mother's Life (2005) and Letters To A Young Journalist (2006). His previous books are Small Victories: The Real World of a Teacher, Her Students and Their High School (1990); Upon This Rock: The Miracles of a Black Church (1993); and The Inheritance: How Three Families and America Moved from Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond (1996) and Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry (2000). Freedman is currently at work on his seventh book, The Big Game: Football and Freedom in the Civil Rights South.
Jew vs. Jew won the National Jewish Book Award for Non-Fiction in 2001 and made the Publishers Weekly Religion Best-Sellers list. As a result of the book, Freedman was named one of the "Forward Fifty" most important American Jews in the year 2000 by the weekly Jewish newspaper The Forward.
Small Victories was a finalist for the 1990 National Book Award and The Inheritance was a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize. Upon This Rock won the 1993 Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism. Four of Freedman's books have been listed among The New York Times' Notable Books of the Year.
Freedman was a staff reporter for The Times from 1981 through 1987 and currently writes the column "On Religion." From 2004 through 2008, he wrote the "On Education" column, which won first prize in the Education Writers Association's annual competition. He is also a regular columnist on American Jewish issues for the Jerusalem Post. He has contributed to numerous other publications and websites, including USA Today, New York, Rolling Stone, Salon, and BeliefNet. In broadcast journalism, Freedman has served on occasion as a correspondent to Religion and Ethics Newsweekly on PBS.
A tenured professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Freedman was named the nation's outstanding journalism educator in 1997 by the Society of Professional Journalists. His class in book-writing has developed nearly 50 authors, editors, and agents, and it has been featured in Publishers Weekly and the Christian Science Monitor. He is a board member of the Institute for American Values and the Jewish Book Council. He has spoken at the Smithsonian Institution, Yale University, and UCLA, among other venues, and has appeared on National Public Radio, CNN, and the News Hour with Jim Lehrer.
Freedman holds a bachelor's degree in journalism and history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which he received in May 1977.
Freedman lives in Manhattan with his children.