He has authored six nonfiction books, including Who She Was: A Son's Search for His Mother's Life,[1] a book about his mother's life as a teenager and young woman, and Letters to a Young Journalist.[2]
Freedman has won the National Jewish Book Award[3][4] in 2000 in the Non-Fiction category for Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry.[5] His book The Inheritance: How Three Families Moved from Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond[6] was a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize. His latest book, Breaking the Line: The Season in Black College Football That Transformed the Sport and Changed the Course of Civil Rights, was published in New York, in August 2013 by Simon & Schuster.
Born on October 3, 1955, in Lenox Hill HospitalinNew York, Freedman was raised in Highland Park, New Jersey, along with his younger brother and sister. His father, David Freedman co-founded the life science company New Brunswick Scientific (now a subsidiary of Eppendorf). His mother, Eleanor (née Hatkin) was the subject of his book, Who She Was.
Before publishing his first book, Small Victories: The Real World of a Teacher, Her Students, and Their High School,[8] and gaining his professorship at Columbia University, Freedman was a staff reporter for the Culture section of The New York Times.
"There are very few journalists in Sam Freedman's league," notes novelist Robert O'Brian. "His empathy, his intellect, his discipline, experience, and warmth, are immediately apparent even to the casual reader."[citation needed]
Small Victories: The Real World of a Teacher, Her Students, and Their High School, New York: Harper and Row (1990)
Upon This Rock: The Miracles of a Black Church, New York: HarperCollins (1993)
The Inheritance: How Three Families Moved from Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond, New York: Simon & Schuster (1996)
Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry, New York: Simon & Schuster (2000)
Who She Was: A Son's Search for His Mother's Life, New York: Simon & Schuster (2005)
Letters to a Young Journalist, New York: Basic Books (2006, revised and updated in 2011)
Breaking the Line: The Season in Black College Football That Transformed the Sport and Changed the Course of Civil Rights, New York: Simon & Schuster (2013)
Freedman has described white identity as "a source of power and privilege", that has been utilized historically in the US in "opposition to black progress" (commonly called white backlash). He has also suggested that Donald Trump's administration has used the conservative movement and Republicanism as a vehicle for white identity.[11]
^Samuel G. Freedman (2000), Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry, New York: Simon & Schuster.
^Samuel G. Freedman (1996), The Inheritance: How Three Families Moved from Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond, New York: Simon & Schuster.
^Freedman, Samuel G. "How I Learned Shive", The Forward, November 29, 2015. Accessed June 27, 2019. "He exuded a kind of sullen charisma that I envied, and that marked us, at least superficially, as very different members of New Jersey’s Highland Park High School, class of 1973."
^Samuel G. Freedman (1990), Small Victories: The Real World of a Teacher, Her Students, and Their High School, New York: Harper and Row.
