YMMV / The Chosen

• Genius Bonus: While immensely popular with non-Jews, being an observant Jew and grounded in Jewish history helps a lot - especially in the sequel The Promise, which goes into the many scholarly debates raging in the 1950's in yeshivas, and features a character who is an Expy of the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, Mordechai Kaplan.
• Ho Yay: In the third chapter, Reuven is surprisingly happy to see Danny, who had almost blinded him just a few days earlier. In the fifth, he is looking up at the sky and thinks, randomly, that it's the same color as Danny's eyes. And that's before they become close.
• Iron Woobie: Danny. Reuven too, because being a friend of an Iron Woobie makes it contagious.
  • Even Rebbe Saunders, in a weird way. Before coming to America, he went through the Trauma Conga Line in a big way: his first wife and child were murdered in a pogrom that he himself barely survived (he was shot, stabbed, and left for dead). And at the end we find out that his missing older brother was murdered in Auschwitz.
• Values Dissonance: Many would consider raising in silence to be abusive and, at the least, it is a strange way to teach compassion.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Symbolic? : This is Chaim Potok. There's always something symbolic.
• The Woobie: Daniel Saunders