About The Book

In Coming Together, Coming Apart, Gordis tells a timely, relevant, and deeply personal tale that lays bare the complex problems of the seemingly intractable and often incomprehensible Israeli-Palestinian conflict, reveals how much is at stake, and underscores the toll the struggle takes on every human being it touches.

Coming Together, Coming Apart is “a powerful, multilayered true love story like non you have every read before – the deeply resonant and satisfying memoir of a man struggling to hold his world together as his country is being torn apart”.

- excerpted from front jacket flap

Praise for Coming Together, Coming Apart

"Interesting conversation is Israel''s most ingratiating commodity, and this is an especially interesting one. To read Coming Together, Coming Apart is to be engaged in an ongoing dialogue with one of Israel''s most thoughtful observers--an American who made Israel his home, despite its imperfections and dangers. Gordis''s conversational narrative is irresistible."

--Alan Dershowitz, author of The Case for Israel

"Whether describing a walk through Jerusalem in snow, a hike in the desert, or a farewell family drive to the Gaza settlements, Gordis manages to capture the essential details that tell us the larger meaning of our Israeli lives. There is much irony in this book, and also anger, especially against those who unfairly judge Israel in its most desperate and noble times. Most of all, though, this book is the chronicle of a love story--of an immigrant family in Jerusalem falling in love with Israel and, through that love, discovering the strength to cope with life on the front lines of a jihadist war. As a fellow Jerusalemite, I feel a profound debt to Gordis for explaining what it means to raise a family in the middle of a terror zone, and the courage that average Israelis instinctively display in maintaining the pretense of normal life. Those of us who share his passion are fortunate to be so well represented by this book."

--Yossi Klein Halevi, Foreign Correspondent, The New Republic

About The Author

Dr. Daniel Gordis is Senior Vice President of the Shalem Center, where he is also a senior fellow. The author of numerous books on Jewish thought and currents in Israel, Dr. Gordis was the founding dean of the Ziegler Rabbinical School at the University of Judaism, the first rabbinical college on the West Coast of the United States. Dr. Gordis joined Shalem in 2007 after spending nine years as vice president of the Mandel Foundation in Israel and director of its Leadership Institute.

Since moving to Israel in 1998, Dr. Gordis has written and lectured throughout the world on Israeli society and the challenges facing the Jewish state. His writing has appeared in magazines and newspapers including the New York Times, the New Republic, the New York Times Magazine, Moment, Tikkun, and Conservative Judaism. His latest book, Will Israel Survive?, is forthcoming from Wiley in 2008. He is presently at work on a volume about 19th and 20th century rabbinic responsa on conversion, which he is writing together with Rabbi David Ellenson of the Hebrew Union College.

Dr. Gordis received his B.A. from Columbia College, a Masters Degree and Rabbinic Ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and his Ph.D. from the University of Southern California.

He lives in Jerusalem with his wife, Elisheva, and three children.

Bibliography

Books:

Will Israel Survive? (Wiley, forthcoming 2008)

Coming Together, Coming Apart: A Memoir of Heartbreak and Promise in Israel (Wiley, 2006)

Home to Stay: One American Family's Chronicle of Miracles and Struggles in Contemporary Israel (Random House, 2003)

If a Place Can Make You Cry: Dispatches from an Anxious State (Crown/Random House, 2002)

Becoming a Jewish Parent: How to Explore Spirituality and Tradition with Your Children (Random House, 1999)

Does the World Need the Jews: Rethinking Chosenness and American Jewish Identity (Scribner, 1997)

God Was Not in the Fire: The Search for a Spiritual Judaism (Scribner, 1995)

Articles:

The Shame Of It All
7 March, 2008

Gentlemen, Bow Your Heads
3 September 2007

Disharmonious Society
The New Republic, 12 August 2006

Needing Israel
New York Times

E-mail from an Anxious State
New York Times Magazine, September 2001

Israel The Eternal Nation
08 September 2006

Leaving Gaza, One Year Later
The Jewish Week, 12 August 2006
Op Ed, April 2002