He is known for his novels Everything Is Illuminated (2002), Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005), Here I Am (2016), and for his non-fiction works Eating Animals (2009) and We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast (2019).

Safran Foer was a "flamboyant" and sensitive child who, at the age of 8, was injured in a classroom chemical accident that resulted in "something like a nervous breakdown drawn out over about three years," during which "he wanted nothing, except to be outside his own skin.

"[4][6] Safran Foer attended Georgetown Day School and in 1994 traveled to Israel with other North American Jewish teenagers in a program sponsored by Bronfman youth fellowships.

in philosophy from Princeton in 1999 after completing a 40-page-long senior thesis, titled "Before Reading The Book of Anticedents: Intention, Literary Interpretation, and the Hypothesized Author", under the supervision of Gideon Rosen.

[11][12] After graduating from Princeton, Safran Foer briefly attended the Mount Sinai School of Medicine before dropping out to pursue his writing career.

In 2001, he edited the anthology A Convergence of Birds: Original Fiction and Poetry Inspired by the Work of Joseph Cornell, to which he contributed the short story, "If the Aging Magician Should Begin to Believe".

In it, Safran Foer used 9/11 as a backdrop for the story of 9-year-old Oskar Schell, who learns how to deal with the death of his father in the World Trade Center.

In March 2012, The New American Haggadah, edited by Safran Foer and translated by Nathan Englander, was released to mixed reviews.

It attempts to explain why and how humans can be so loving to our companion animals while simultaneously being indifferent to others,[27] and explores what this inconsistency tells us about ourselves―what kinds of stories emerge from this selectivity.

[34] Safran Foer's first book of non-fiction, Eating Animals (2009), addresses problems associated with industrialized meat and the ensuing ethical concerns.

[35] He said that he had long been "uncertain about how I felt [about eating meat]" and that the birth of his first child inspired "an urgency because I would have to make decisions on his behalf".