Bernard Malamud. Saul Bellow. Philip Roth. Joseph Heller. Herman Wouk. J.D. Salinger. Norman Mailer. E.L. Doctorow. Chaim Potok. Leon Uris.

That is a partial list of American Jewish writers of the recent past -- all of them lions of literature, and all of them now dead.

There is one woman who belongs on that list, and she is the only one left of that generation. I refer to Cynthia Ozick, who last week celebrated her 95th birthday.

Cynthia Ozick's literary output has been prodigious. Not only fiction, but non-fiction and literary criticism -- at a dizzying intellectual level. Cynthia Ozick is not only our greatest surviving literary figure from that generation; she is also one of American Jewry's and America's preeminent public intellectuals.

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