The stories were praised by A. G. Mojtabai in a review published by The New York Times in 1981: "Where the Jackals Howl is a strong, beautiful, disturbing book. It speaks piercingly -whether wittingly or unwittingly, I know not - of a dimension of the Israeli experience not often discussed, of the specter of the other brother, of a haunting, an unhealed wound; it reminds us of polarizations everywhere that bind and diminish us, that may yet rend us."[4]
In 1991, Jay Parini wrote an interview profile on Oz for The New York Times Magazine, with Parini commenting on the novel: "The eight stories in that volume have a kind of primal ferocity and emotional roughness absent from the later work, where more subtle shades of feeling are conjured. Conflicts between nomad herders and settlers, raiders and counterraiders, occur throughout the tales. Love stories mingle with hate stories, while the land of Israel itself, wind-swept and bare, becomes the main character in this fiction -- the terra firma upon which human fate is played out against a violent background."[5]
In 2012, Adam Kirsch wrote for Tablet: "Almost 50 years after it first appeared, Where the Jackals Howl remains one of the most remorseless fictional X-rays of the Israeli soul."[6]
