Rating: 
Summary: Falling in Love with the Mideast
Review: I read Wendy Orange's "Coming Home to Jerusalem" a few nights ago and was riveted. It began out in a familiar world to me-- as I grew up in Flushing, Queens at the same time that Wendy was growing up in Woodmere, Long Island. And at first I thought it was going to be one of those books where a woman reveals everything about her own life-- which I adore reading. The instant she arrived in Israel for a trip, it all changes. After 4 days (and nights) of being scared to leave her luxury hotel and adventure into the streets of Jerusalem, Wendy does. She falls in love with the Mideast instantly. But what changes everything is that evening, she bumps into an Israeli, they sit at a cafe talking, and as she listens she realizes that even though he is railing against peace with the Arabs, at the very same time he sees a case for it. The man is in turmoil in his own heart. And as she sits quietly, tenderly, listening-- she actually sees him bring forth a case for peace, which surprises him to contemplate. Her love, understanding, and quietness have helped him. By just a loving listening-- he sees what he always wanted to see, but never could. It is a brief encounter. She never meets him again. But she has freed him, and he has freed her. Because she had set out on this trip, as a solution to feeling trapped and cut off from her real self. Suddenly she feels free, and she loves herself. She begins to fall in love with the Mideast in earnest and the Mideast falls in love with her. She returns to USA, packs her bags, and moves there with her daughter. And discovers that is what she loves doing best and what everyone wants from her. Israelis and Palestinians alike all want someone who will listen to them with love. Every encounter-- is as if that very first encounter was the bud, and now we have the beautiful rose. Wendy feels like a new person, giving and getting love wherever she goes-- and every single person she encounters also feels some binds slipping away. Amazingly, Wendy's experience is mirrored by Mideast politics at that instant. It is the great moment-- when Rabin and Arafat choose peace. This is an extraordinary and unusual book. Both personal and political-- and when the personal is political-- the light of love shines through. Thank you Wendy for your wonderful book. I send you all my love. Love, Anne Mesquite
Rating:
Summary: Outsider/Insider
Review: It has often been said that the best perspective for a writer is the stance of the outsider. Ms. Orange succeeds in that rarest of positions, the outsider who guilelessly admits to being a beginner and then in a few thrilling leaps plunges into the fray to become part of the intellignentsia. And there could be no place on earth more challenging than the Middle East. The reader will want to follow Ms. Orange on the journey because her intelligence and unswerving gaze, both outward and inward never falters. This book is rare in its willingness to combine the mundane - everyday parenting dilemmas, friendships, and love - with the big issues - politics in an embattled land. Both are handled with a prose that jumps off the page and carries the reader forward from first to last. An unforgettable book.
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Summary: I JUST BOUGHT TWENTY COPIES
Review: I just finished reading this book. It took me only two days because IT IS A PAGE TURNER! I am planning a trip to Israel next year and now feel as it I've already been there. Though I follow the news about Israel--so much seems to be happening there now-- I never really understood the world of Israelis and Palestinians until I finished Coming Home. Ms. Orange slowly but steadily builds a sense of the characters, landscapes, and the overall atmosphere in which everyone in Israel lives. This clarified much that I never realized that I didn't know. I usually prefer reading fiction, but this book reads so easily that I felt really sad when it was finished. And so... I just bought twenty copies, some to use in my classroom and the rest to give as presents to my best friends. 5 stars -- ABSOLUTELY!
Rating: 
Summary: An inside view of life in Israel by a spur o the moment oleh
Review: Israel always felt a part of Wendy's family growing up in upper middle class Long Island. Her grandfather died while giving an impassioned fund raising speech during the Six Day War in 1967. Her grandmother died the night after the Yom Kippur War broke out. Her parents died during the period of the Lebanon War. Wendy Orange, a divorced, single parent, psychologist, and teacher, visited Israel for the first time in 1990 for an academic conference. She was in her 40's, between jobs in Cambridge, newly divorced; so after a week or two in Jerusalem, she made aliyah. It was her first visit, and she knew no Hebrew, very little Jewish history, or Israeli political culture. But this didn't stop her from becoming a reporter for Tikkun Magazine. How can one meet with George Habash's group without even knowing who he is? Oh god, did my blood boil when I started reading this book. Must Israel be the haven for all those in midlife crisis? But SERIOUSLY, by the fifth chapter, I got over my notions, and enjoyed the book. Join Wendy as she lands in Israel with her two daughters, finds a place to live, feels both euphoric and disassociated (ahhh, the beauty of having a psychologist for an author), moves in to the King David, finds another place to live, looks for work, finds an ulpan, falls madly in love, makes friends, meets the intelligentsia and the cab drivers, and has an affair with her cab driver and protector. Oh, and what a boon when she discovers that she inherited some land too. Over her 6 years there, she imparts a feeling of what it's like to live in Israeli society and be a "part" of the peace process.
Rating:
Summary: The book is a living experience
Review: Wow. This is a non-stop read. The author carries you through Israel and into each person she meets, each landscape she discovers. This book stimulates you to think and rethink. With the author, you are in the middle of war. You are in the middle of peace-making. In the middle of a biblical experience. She wakes you up. Makes you think on many levels-- whether she is talking to the Palestinian, to the Israeli, to the Orthodox or to the Sephardim. I lived their stories with her. She's constantly sharing her mind as she stumbles,backtracks, leaps forward and whirls you into new insights on what it means to be Jewish, to be Palestinian, to be human. This book is alive. It makes me want to write. It makes me want to ask new questions of my neighbors--to search for peace and community--not only in Israel but in all the places we live. To ask those around me: uncomfortable questions. And to find out, perhaps: uncomfortable answers. This book does that. This book does what a great book should do! Five Stars. At least.
Rating: 
Summary: Wendy Orange is an original voice...
Review: "Wendy Orange is an original voice - passionate, personal and compelling. Her heart beats within her words, whether she is dealing with events or personalities, facts or ideology, writing about Jews or Arabs, or looking at the world from Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza or Boston. Her chapter on Yitzhak Rabin's assassination is a perfect example of her deft melding of interpretation and intimacy. She discovers the exhilaration of making peace, one person at a time." - Letty Cottin Pogrebin, author of Deborah, Golda, and Me "In Wendy Orange, the Middle East has finally met up with a journalist as volatile and unpredictable as the region itself. Her attempt to understand the turbulent relationship between Israelis and Arabs is by turns zany, penetrating and tragicomic. What Orange brings to a situation that has confounded countless observers before her is a refreshing lack of solemnity. Instead she brings boundless curiosity and an irrepressible candor, thereby giving complex political realities a very human face." - Daphne Merkin, author of Dreaming of Hitler "I love this book. Orange is a writer of enormous wit and energy and humanity...This will become a classic because it's almost larger than life. After reading this book, you will feel as if you've known this author forever." - Sara Blackburn "Being neither a Jew nor an Arab, COMING HOME TO JERUSALEM propelled me into a foreign land - the Middle East. The passion and precision of Orange's writing makes this journey of a soul navigating the Mideast labyrinth a memorable, rare account. This book is HOT." - John Ratey, M.D., author of Driven to Distraction and Shadow Syndromes In 1991, Wendy Orange was a thoroughly American Jew - a psychologist, teacher, and single mother of a five-year-old daughter, living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Although she had grown up in a household fiercely devoted to Israel, she herself was largely indifferent to the Jewish state. Then her grandparents and parents died, and the Gulf war broke out, and she began to wonder, "So who is taking care of Israel now? Maybe it's my turn." At loose ends both personally and professionally, she attended a conference in Jerusalem, where she immediately fell in love with Israel: with its enchanting and historic landscape, its manic energy and enveloping intimacy, and most of all with its vibrant, tragically divided people - Jews, Israeli Arabs and Palestinians alike. COMING HOME TO JERUSALEM: A Personal Journey is the luminous, often funny, sometimes painful story of Orange's passionate relationship with Israel - her work as Mideast correspondent for Tikkun, the influential Jewish-American journal; her love affair with a Moroccan-Israeli cab driver, who gave her an education in Israel's class schisms; her extensive involvement with the Israeli peace movement, including many forays into the turbulent territories of Gaza and the West Bank; her observations on the tortuous progress of the Arab-Israeli peace process and the wrenching assassination of Yitzhak Rabin; and the circumstances that ultimately forced her to leave the country where she had planned to spend the rest of her life. Flying back to the United States after her first visit to Jerusalem, Orange realizes that her almost instantaneous decision to move to Israel had no logic to it. From the perspective of that time, she writes: "I have no religious life, speak no Hebrew, have only a beginner's grasp of Mideast culture and politics. To live in Jerusalem, I'll have to give up my work as a psychologist and professor. I'll have to learn Hebrew. I'll be uprooting my already vulnerable daughter, who's been moved about too often in her short life. She's excited and ready to enter kindergarten with her new Cambridge friends. Tearing her away from all she knows simply because I like myself and this world I've briefly glimpsed gives me pause. Maybe I am suffering from what psychiatrists call Jerusalem madness, an affliction that's common among travelers to the Holy City, those who in no time believe that they're Jesus or Moses. Except that my delusion, if that's what that is, is that in Jerusalem I've become myself." Growing up in suburban Long Island, New York, and in every other place she lived - Manhattan, rural Jamaica, Vermont - Orange had the sensation of being only randomly or arbitrarily placed. There was always a feeling of alienation, of living in an anywhere but not a somewhere. As a child, she had been obsessed with the Holocaust, reading endlessly on the subject and sometimes imagining that the commuter trains that passed behind her house were the death trains that carried Jews to concentration camps. Only gradually did she come to see that the powerful familial ties she felt instantly in Israel were connected to the fate she didn't suffer, the fate she lived in her imagination as a child. Jerusalem's old stones, Orange writes, "have a warmth that seems born of history, evocative of recent generations in my family, my intimate link to the vast chain of Jewish history. I've long known that our inner moods can create external reality, but now I know that the converse is true: that an outer world of meanings can shift interior reality, the sense of who we are. . . .In stunningly candid reconciliation sessions between Israelis and Palestinians, she witnesses the persistence and courage of those on both sides who look past current bitterness and atrocities to a hope-filled future. Above all, she reveals a central aspect of the Middle East that she believes is virtually unreported: its day-to-day ethnic porousness, the racial cross-fertilizations which take place so visibly over there that nobody finds them noteworthy. After three years in Israel, Orange receives news that once again unexpectedly alters the course of her life: her daughter, Eliza, is diagnosed as severely dyslexic. Needing remedial English just to learn the rudiments of her native language, Eliza is utterly clueless in Hebrew. Since there are no appropriate programs for her daughter in Israel, Orange must take her back to the United States immediately; there is no other choice. Mourning Israel like a lost love, Orange writes, "That I'm the 'one in a thousand' secular American Jews who needs to live in Israel and that my daughter is the one kid in a thousand who cannot, at least for now, stay there is a strange denouement." Back in Cambridge, Orange recognizes that she must stop living emotionally in Jerusalem - that she must let the passion and fascination recede. But then the shocking assassination of Yitzhak Rabin reverses her attempt to live outside the Israeli-Palestinian world. Returning to Israel for his funeral, she finds a nation divided even in its grief, with many Israelis vehemently opposed to Rabin's efforts to make peace with the Palestinians. Yet at a festive gathering on a West Bank hilltop that brings together more than five hundred ordinary Israelis and Palestinians, she gets a glimpse of what could be.
Rating:
Summary: The Return of The Great Summer Read!
Review: A friend handed me this book and insisted, "This is the Summer Read that will stay in your head and heart." Looking at the cover, I assumed she had thought of me because, years ago, I worked in the Middle East. I am not Jewish, not Arab, and most importantly, I find politics of any kind to be boring. But Orange manages to make the politics irresistible through the lives of a host of individuals. She tells the story on so many levels, from specific moments already past to global consequences and conundrums which remain in effect. Even better than being the truth, the story is a page-turner. I loved the consciousness that runs throughout. This book delivers in so many categories: it is a woman's journey, a foreign affair, an education in the invisible life of Israel, a portrait of the Palestinians, a story filled with immediacy and charm. I was drawn into the picture and along for the ride. It is not merely a travelogue-- but it is definitely a TRIP. You're a member of the author's family within paragraphs but the writing never sinks to the tedious or home-grown. It is consistently literate, graceful, witty and to the point. Orange puts you on an intimate basis with her subjects immediately, sometimes with a single image or phrase. Highly recommended for anyone who loves to read. The statement that best captures my take on Coming Home To Jerusalem is, "This book gets under your skin and the pleasure is all yours!"
Rating:
Summary: Insightful and evocative
Review: I really enjoyed this book. It was very well written and heartfelt, with unbiased, evocative descriptions of people and places. Made me want to hop on a plane and go there immediately!
Rating: 
Summary: Well-written and honest, but naive
Review: This easy-to-read book packs a wallop Especially Now. IF the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has Anything to do with the Terrorism against the USA, this book shows how that peace was almost attained. That is the true importance of "Coming Home to Jerusalem." It's a book without sentimentality but with a lot of true sentiment. People-to-People Dialogue was, for me, the most moving and now the most important part of this book. I believe strongly that this is an honest account, what ideally belongs under "Conflict Resolution" rather than "Judaica" because the core of Orange's work shows warring opponents as less different than is ordinarily percieved. Ms. Orange's work is especially relevant now when the Jingoism in USA is (understandably, if unfortunately) going full tilt. NOT that I believe we can dialogue with Osama Ben L. But there are many around the world worth talking to-- rather than hunting for more murderous rounds of senseless violence. Were there more Dialogue and less guns and bombs, wouldn't the hard core terrorists have far less support? Think about that and read this book in paperback. 5 stars.
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