[These] essays are truly magnificent! I have been reading them with enormous pleasure, given their scope and depth and given how surprisingly resonant are our range of interests from classical music to Torah study to popular culture, politics, travel, etc. Jochnowitz's sojourn in China is fascinating as is his playful, witty, but very serious writing on a wide variety of matters including happiness, homosexuality, Israel, etc. This is a joy, so well written, so sophisticated. Jochnowitz is a learned and charming man and his ideas, reconsidered, are both delightful and truly informative. Reading this volume is like visiting with a Renaissance intellectual who has invited you for tea. He is as familiar with Chinese and China as he is with the Bible, Plato, Mozart, Shakespeare and Marx-and that's just for starters.
— Phyllis Chesler, Emerita Professor, Author of Women and Madness, Woman's Inhumanity to Woman, The New Anti-Semitism, and The Death of Feminism, B
Topics are connected by the running theme of reconsiderations, the author's reflections and re-evaluations of his understanding of and relationship to the world about him....the ideas come together: the reconsider-ation of a New York Jewish liberal who realizes not before time that what he really values has to be preserved.
— 2008; Mentalities
Jochnowitz, throughout the essays, is animated by the cool precision of logic....[His] essays are scintillating, amusing, and provocative.
— Midstream: A Quarterly Jewish Review , February 2009
George Jochnowitz's essays on politics, art, religion, and human nature are original, thought-provoking, and a pleasure to read.
— Steven Pinker, Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, and The Blank Slate