Dr. Michael J. Cooper: A Healer, Storyteller, and Bridge to Coexistence

NATIONWIDE - SEPTEMBER 2025 - (USAnews.com) In 1966, a 17-year-old from Oakland, California, packed his bags and left for Israel. Michael arrived in Jerusalem during the city’s final year of division, stepping into a place where history pressed in on every stone. That began a decade of immersion, which would root him in the cultural complexities of the Holy Land. Starting with a year of study at a Hebrew teacher’s academy in Jerusalem, followed by two years of biology at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and six years of study at Tel Aviv University medical school, Cooper did an additional two post-graduate years of study, before returning to the US to specialize in pediatric cardiology..

Now a retired physician, Dr. Cooper reflects on more than medicine in his writing. Over a forty-year career, including two decades of pediatric cardiology missions treating Palestinian children in the West Bank, he has seen firsthand the devastating impact of conflict—and the human resilience that persists in its shadow. His novels transform that lived experience into compelling historical fiction, weaving adventure with a message of peace, coexistence, and dignity.

From Healing Hearts to Healing Histories

Though Dr. Cooper had written dozens of peer-reviewed medical research articles, his turn to fiction was not an abandonment of medicine but an expansion of his lifelong mission to heal. Inspired by the shock and despair that followed the 1995 assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin—and the collapse of hopes for peace that followed—he began channeling his grief into storytelling. Fiction became a way to address the same human suffering he encountered as a doctor: through empathy, imagination, and narrative.

His first novel, Foxes in the Vineyard (2011), set in Jerusalem during the 1948 war, captured espionage, mysticism, and the fractured realities of a city in upheaval. The novel won the Grand Prize at the 2011 Indie Publishing Contest, signaling the arrival of a new voice in historical fiction.

Weaving Empires, Identities, and Youth

With Wages of Empire (2022), Dr. Cooper widened his canvas to World War I, tracing young lives caught between the fading Ottoman Empire and rising nationalist movements throughout Europe and the Middle East. The book earned the 2022 CIBA Rossetti Grand Prize for Young Adult Fiction and First Place in the 2022 CIBA Hemingway Award for Wartime Historical Fiction. Its sequel, Crossroads of Empire (2023), continued the saga with a broader lens, also winning First Place in the 2023 CIBA Hemingway Award for Wartime Historical Fiction.

Both novels carried familiar motifs—Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, shifting empires, and fragile hopes for peace—but also underscored something central to Cooper’s vision: the humanity of those living in times of upheaval, and the idea that remembering and understanding the past can shape more peaceful futures.

The Rabbi’s Knight: Crusades, Conflict, and a Strong Heroine

Released in September 2025, The Rabbi’s Knight turns the clock back to the 13th century to the twilight of the Crusades. It’s a ‘stand alone’ book though it also serves as a prequel to Wages of Empire. At the book’s core is a powerful female protagonist—a beautiful,  intelligent, and courageous young woman who refuses to submit to a life of subjugation in an emir’s harem. Instead, she forges her destiny in unexpected places, including a leper colony, where she emerges as a force of resilience and agency.

By centering a character of such strength, Cooper does more than recount history—he reclaims it. In an era when literature often reserved power for men of status, he elevates women’s roles as shapers of events and carriers of hope. The novel is also rich with historical intrigue, but its deeper purpose lies in the way it reflects Cooper’s broader mission: to tell stories where people of different faiths and identities—Christian, Muslim, Jewish—interact not only in conflict but in unexpected alliances, coexistence, and shared struggles.

Volunteer Missions and the Human Lens

Dr. Cooper’s authority as a novelist does not come solely from archival research. It grows out of lived encounters: more than 26 medical missions over two decades, caring for Palestinian children in the West Bank who would otherwise go untreated. These journeys into communities under stress gave him a vantage point few writers share. He saw, up close, the contradictions of the Holy Land—the wounds of conflict, but also the humanity and yearning for peace that transcends divisions.

It is this human lens that distinguishes his novels. They are not simply about political powers or battlefield clashes. They are about the families, children, and individuals caught in between—characters who embody the timeless struggle to preserve dignity and find belonging in fractured landscapes.

Stories as a Path Toward Peace

Across Foxes in the Vineyard, Wages of Empire, Crossroads of Empire, and now The Rabbi’s Knight, Dr. Cooper’s novels share a unifying thread: the belief that stories can bend the arc of history toward coexistence. While rooted in the rigor of research and the sweep of epic narratives, his books carry a deeper current—a moral appeal to empathy, reconciliation, and recognition of the “other.”

As the Historical Novel Society noted in its review of The Rabbi’s Knight, Cooper has an uncanny ability to blend gripping suspense with a message of peace: “With a common goal, all people of good faith can work together to find solutions.”

Read, Reflect, and Reimagine

Dr. Michael J. Cooper’s journey—from his youth in a divided Jerusalem, to a career in pediatric cardiology, to decades of volunteer medical missions, to his award-winning novels—there is the embodiment of  a life dedicated to healing, whether through medicine or storytelling. His fiction is not escapist entertainment; it is a vehicle for exploring identity, honoring resilience, and insisting on the possibility of peace.

For readers who seek more than just historical drama, his novels offer a transformative experience: history reimagined through empathy, suspense infused with purpose, and characters who remind us that even in the darkest times, coexistence is possible.

Discover Dr. Cooper’s work, beginning with the newly released The Rabbi’s Knight. Visit Michael J. Cooper’s Website for more information, and follow him on FaceBook and Instagram for updates on his writing and mission of peace.