 Ostrer has written two other books on genetics, Essentials of Medical Genomics (2002 with Stuart Brown and John Hay) and Non-Mendelian Genetics in Humans (1998).Ostrer has received awards from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, March of Dimes Birth Defects Foundation, Skin Cancer Foundation and Weizmann Institute of Science.In October, 2010, he was named to the Forward 50 list of “people who have made an imprint in the past year on the ways in which American Jews view the world and relate to each other.”

Ostrer received criticism from Johns Hopkins University post-doc Eran Elhaik, who challenged the validity of Ostrer's past work on the topic of the origin of European Jews.