This Shabbat features a dinner hosted by our Sisterhood. Author Michael Cooper will be doing a reading from his award-winning books: Wages of Empire and Crossroads of Empire, historical fictions set in the Middle East.
Community dinner at 6pm
Lay led service (15 minutes) at 7pm
Author presentation at 7:15pm
About Michael Cooper:
Michael J Cooper is a northern California native, who moved to Israel after graduating from Oakland high school in 1966. Living in Jerusalem during the last year the city was divided between Israel and Jordan, he studied at a Hebrew teacher’s academy, and after the 6-Day War, studied biology at Hebrew University in Jerusalem for two years, followed by studies at Tel Aviv University Medical School where he graduated in 1975. After internship and a year of residency, he returned to California to specialize in pediatric cardiology at UCSF. He remained on faculty at UCSF while working as a Kaiser pediatric cardiologist for the next forty years. For the past twenty years he has returned twice a year on volunteer medical missions to the Palestinian Authority, caring for children without access to care. He will be traveling to Israel this July for another medical mission, as well to visit family and friends, and to attend the 50 th reunion of his Tel-Aviv University medical school class. When not traveling, he writes and teaches Hebrew to 7th graders at his synagogue, Congregation B’nai Shalom. He lives with his wife in Lafayette, California with a neurotic but lovable Golden Retriever and a spoiled-rotten cat. Three adult children occasionally drop by.
His “writer’s journey” began following the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin in 1995. Dr. Cooper was determined to convey a message of coexistence and peace, and began writing op-eds, essays, and historical fiction set in the Holy Land at major turning points of history. His latest prize-winning novels are part of that endeavor.
Set during WW1, the pages of WAGES OF EMPIRE and its sequel, CROSSROADS OF EMPIRE, are filled with real people from that time: Chaim Weizmann, Asher Ginsberg (AKA, Achad Ha’am), Faisal bin Hussein, Gertrude Bell, TE Lawrence, Winston Churchill, and the narcissistic antisemite, Kaiser Wilhelm II.
WAGES OF EMPIRE, winner of the 2025 Pacific Book Award for best historical fiction as well as other awards, begins at the start of WWI, introducing the fictional 16-year-old Evan Sinclair as his story is interwoven with other fictional and the historical characters. We follow Evan as he leaves home to join the Great War, crosses the Atlantic Ocean and enters the killing fields of the Western Front. Little does Evan realize that, despite the war raging in Europe, the true source of conflict will emerge in Ottoman Palestine, since it's from Jerusalem where the German kaiser dreams to rule as Holy Roman Emperor with dominion over Arabian oil reserves, control of the Suez Canal, and with an eye to promote Germano-Nordic racial supremacy throughout the world. Joining the war in occupied Belgium, Evan will help turn the tide of a war that is just beginning, and become part of a story that’s still being written.
CROSSROADS OF EMPIRE, winner of the 2024 CIBA first prize for wartime fiction and other awards, continues the story. With Evan having survived German artillery and poison gas, he barely survives a hospital ship’s sinking by a German U-boat. Left with amnesia, Evan doesn’t remember who he is. As he struggles to regain his memory, the Middle East Front explodes with pitched battles at the Suez Canal and Gallipoli. Evan eventually and under mysterious circumstances regains his memory and discovers far more than his memories: he finds love for his father and grief for his mother who died in childbirth two years before. He also discovers something completely unexpected—hidden secrets of his bloodline—an unbroken lineage that stretches back to the Crusades that will determine his future role in the Great War and beyond.