A longtime advocate for peace in the Middle East, Steve has written articles on the subject appearing in publications for organizations including The American Council for Judaism and Americans for Middle East Understanding (AMEU).

As a child, Steve collected dimes to help plant trees in Israel. Like most young Jewish boys, he believed that Jews had come to an uninhabited land of deserts and swamps and made the land bloom. But as an adult he saw United Nations data that showed that about 700,000 Palestinians became refugees during the fighting of 1948. “That seemed odd,” he says. “If we Jews had come to a land of empty swamps and deserts as I had been taught as a child, how did so many Palestinian men, women and children become refugees?”

Steve’s questions led to more research, finding many moral Jewish voices that have been advocating for peace for all people in Israel and Palestine. The Jewish sourced materials and historical artifacts that he found are now on display in the online Promised Land Museum.

“You don’t have to be anti-Palestinian in order to love Israel,” he says. “Judaism, not to mention the Holocaust, teaches us to support peace, justice and security for all people.”

As a physician and medical scientist who works with insurers, patient advocates, pharmaceutical companies, and other physicians to improve healthcare delivery, Steve has been rated one of the world’s leading experts in dermatology.

Steve has lived in North Carolina for more than 40 years and received his medical training at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has been married to his wife Leora for 40 years. They have two sons, one a sportswriter and the other a graduate student studying statistics.