Daniel Jacobs

Daniel Jacobs earned his medical doctorate with Alpha Omega Alpha honors at The Case Western Reserve School of Medicine and completed residencies in General Surgery and Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at the University of Southern California. He earned his Bachelor of Science degree in Biochemistry with highest honors from the University of California at Davis. In the 1990s, Jacobs served as a medical officer in an elite Israeli Air Force extraction unit and served as a surgeon in Israel’s largest hospital. Today, Jacobs is a surgeon in California where he grew up.

Daniel Jacobs was troubled in June of 2010 as he traveled through the concentration camp ruins of World War II. Although the mantra of the trip was “Never Again”, he wasn’t convinced. At the very time that he tried to come to grips with the reality of Auschwitz and Treblinka, missiles fell on southern Israel from Gaza for the ninth straight year, and no one outside of Israel seemed particularly bothered. Yet, just weeks earlier, Israeli commandos intercepted a Gaza bound ship determined to challenge Israel’s naval blockade, and the world erupted in anti-Israel furor when the boarding of the ship turned tragically violent.

The Eyes of Abel doesn’t attempt to decide who is right and who is wrong in the Middle East’s Arab-Israeli conflict as much as it questions how we look at it. In this gripping tale of discovery and intrigue, Jacobs awakens us to how entrenched rhetoric and ossified prejudices perpetuate the conflict rather than bring an end to it.