Rating: 
Summary: Highly readable, personable, and informative
Review: Began as e-mails back home to family, this book's strength is the description of day-to-day life in Israel through good times and bad. For the book, Gordis intersperses the letters with political commentary to give some context to the letters' time of writing. More personal than David Horovitz' A Little Too Close to God, it is similar in bringing the political and personal together as a family debates the wisdom of staying in Israel when the peace process goes bad. You will get drawn into experiencing the emotions and ambivalences the Gordis parents and children have about their life. Very readable!
Rating:
Summary: Excellent and with extreme passion and love
Review: Excellent real story with extreme passion, love and deep understanding. A MUST READ for everyone.
The Jewish State for the Jews, a people so scarified, so much exterminated all over the centuries, in Europe and especially in the Arab world, world that by the beginning of the 20th century decided to exterminate, destroy and kill every single Jews in their countries, destroying as a result communities of 2500 years, reason why these Jews came to Israel our beloved land and home.
Bravo for Daniel Gordis.
BRAVISSIMO !!!!!!
Rating: 
Summary: After Aliyah
Review: Gordis does a great job with a very difficult topic: how a family comes to terms with the nature and depth of its commitment to living in Israel during the matzav. Much of the material consists of examining and re-examining whether peace is possible and what it would take to get there. The book is as personal as it is political, and while nearly every reader will find passages here and there to make the blood boil momentarily, that is reflective of the very nature of the conflict.
Rating:
Summary: After Aliyah
Review: Gordis does a great job with a very difficult topic: how a family comes to terms with the nature and depth of its commitment to living in Israel during the matzav. Much of the material consists of examining and re-examining whether peace is possible and what it would take to get there. The book is as personal as it is political, and while nearly every reader will find passages here and there to make the blood boil momentarily, that is reflective of the very nature of the conflict.
Rating:
Summary: A moving account of difficult times
Review: Home to Stay is a must-read for anyone interested in Israel. It's a moving account of one American family's move to Israel, beautifully written. Rabbi Gordis has a gift for selecting a telling anecdote about family life or a personal observation and relating it to the broader panorama of life in Israel today. I also enthusiatically recommend Rabbi Gordis' previous books, especially "If a Place can make you cry...".
Rating:
Summary: MUST READ!
Review: I wish there were words to describe how great this book was. It is so hard to find a book about everyday Israeli life. In fact, is there? I saw Rabbi Gordis speak in NYC in 2004, and bought the book after his great speech. When you read this book, you feel like you are actually living in Israel. He describes every emotion he and his family is going through, the good and the bad. He is a great observer of human nature, and good writer. A must read for those you yearn to learn about contemporary life in Israel
Rating:
Summary: Why exchange security and prosperity to live in Israel
Review: I've read hundreds of books on Israel -- internal politics, religious strife, relationships with Palestinians, with neighbors in the Mid-East, with American Jews, with the US Congress, etc. This book covers these same issues, less academically but with a human face. The good and the bad. Gordis writes with passion, but not an agenda. An excellent read for anyone who cares about Israel, especially if you have ever considered living there -- or want to better understand why so many Jews have exchanged the security and prosperity they had in the diaspora for life in the Holy Land.
Rating:
Summary: Moving, Inspiring and Surprising
Review: If you read only one book about contemporary Israel, make it this moving, compelling account. Gordis is a gifted scribe and a keen observer and the story of his family's life in Jerusalem reads more like a novel than a mere memoir or journal. He brings to the task an incredible depth of knowledge of Jewish and Israeli history, but what is most striking is his devotion as a parent and how candid he is about his struggles, both internal and external. Even if he were just sharing his observations, it would be a fine read, but Gordis's real talent is finding connections between things: between past and present; between global politics and his own dinner table; between ancient texts and today's headlines. Those often brilliant and surprising associations are what lift this book to the level of literature and make reading it such a pleasure.
Rating: 
Summary: Staying in Israel
Review: In the summer of 1998, Daniel Gordis and his family moved to Israel from Los Angeles. They planned to be there only for a year, but Gordis and his wife decided to remain in Jerusalem permanently, confident that their children would be among the first generation of Israelis to grow up in peace."What followed were two great years, years in which our kids grew and learned a new language, years in which I adjusted to a new professional life... years in which we were buoyed by the excitements and challenges of creating a new chapter in our life as a family, years in which Israel thrived and moved slowly towards peace with her Palestinian neighbors. In many ways, it seemed that things simply couldn't have been better. And then everything came crashing down..." Instead of an era of peace, the Gordis family experienced the outbreak of Intifada hostilities. "No matter what people called it, it was a war. It was a low-grade, drawn-out war of attrition, which left us in a country radically different from the one we had moved to." Because of the 'situation' around him, Daniel Gordis wrote extensively, documenting what was going on in his new home in Israel as the weeks of violence stretched into months, and then into years. "I wrote e-mails to friends about what was happening... Friends forwarded them on to others, a few national Jewish organizations sent them to their e-mail lists... It was a little strange that personal notes I'd first been sending just to friends were getting such wide attention." Those e-mail messages, giving a perceptive first-hand account of what it's like for a family living on the front lines of war, have been finely crafted together in "Home to Stay: One American Family's Chronicle of Miracles and Struggles in Contemporary Israel" (Three Rivers Press, October 2003). The book tells the story of how one American family adjusts to life in Israel and questions whether it was a wise decision to bring young children from safe, suburban Los Angeles to the terror-inflicted streets of Jerusalem. "The big question, of course, is 'why?'... The Hebrew language, the city of Jerusalem, the idea of a Jewish society in which the successes as well as the failures are our own responsibility and no one else's - all these have become part of what we love about living here," Gordon writes, in one of the messages collected in the book. Despite the violence around him, Gordis states clearly, "We're not going 'back to America fast.' We did assume that the Israel we'd come to would more or less be at peace, and we now realize that we may be in for some rough days, weeks, or even a few months. But even with all the tension, we're not ambivalent about being here. We're here because we believe that Jews need a country of their own... We're safe, and frankly, I'd much rather be here during this time than watching it from afar." The going in Israel isn't easy, and the exuberant optimism expressed in the beginning of this book is slowly transformed by the struggles, internal and external, of parents trying to raise, and keep their children safe in a war setting. "There's really no solution," Gordis writes of the 'situation'. "Well, there's one. We could pack up and leave," he says, referring both to his family, and to all the citizens of the Jewish State. "That, of course, isn't going to happen." Determined to stay in Israel, Gordis concludes, "We think that the State of Israel is one of those things that is worth living our lives for... For us, Israel is not just a place - its' a story. And it's not just any story - it's our story, your story, the story of where we've come from, and the story of where we're going. It's a story that our people have been telling for a long time, and we feel a need to be a part of it." The first-person stories in this book, vignettes of life in Israel at peace and at war, are warm, passionate and thoughtful. Publisher's Weekly said Gordis is a "provocative and penetrating observer." This book, an account of a family's struggles in the realities of modern day Israel, is both powerful and immensely moving.
Rating:
Summary: Why exchange security and prosperity to live in Israel
Review: Rabbi Gordis writes with warmth, passion and knowledge. With this book as with his previous books, you become a family member. You laugh, you cry and you break bread. He is an inspiration to all who read his books and follow his journals.
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