Neil Farber, MD, PhD

Neil Farber, MD, PhD, has spent his life at the meeting point of two questions: how the human body endures, and how the human mind decides. He was trained to diagnose. This book is what happens when a diagnostician turns that discipline on the world's oldest hatred.

Trained in a Medical Scientist Training Program, Dr. Farber earned both his MD and a PhD in cardiovascular pharmacology and later completed doctoral studies in religious studies and metaphysics, an inquiry into consciousness, purpose, and the ethics of human behavior. He served as an Associate Professor of Anesthesiology, Pediatrics, and Pharmacology and Toxicology at the Medical College of Wisconsin, and as an Adjunct Professor of Psychology at Arizona State University. A trauma and pediatric anesthesiologist for much of his career, he authored hundreds of peer-reviewed papers and, writing for Psychology Today, reached millions of readers who never set foot in a lecture hall.

Then his own body forced the question inward. The loss of much of his eyesight ended his medical practice and stripped away the certainty he had trained a lifetime to trust. What remained was clarity. He learned, in the hardest way a physician can, that a diagnosis does not require perfect vision. It requires the will to look.

Dr. Farber looks. A dual Canadian and Israeli citizen and an internationally recognized martial arts Grandmaster, he is the founder of Kavanah Krav Maga self-defense system and the co-founder of the Federation of Israeli Martial Arts, led by his wife, Lori, as its executive director. He has trained elite Israeli units, among them Special Forces Egoze operators, and volunteered as a pediatric anesthesiologist in an Israeli hospital during the 2006 Lebanon War. In the days after October 7, 2023, he was again on the ground in Israel, training Golani commandos, paratroopers, and reservists in the Gaza Envelope and along the Lebanon border while the kibbutzim near that border were still being cleared. He has not studied Jew-hatred from a safe distance. He has stood inside its target.

That is the vantage this book is written from. He is the founder of the IDS Institute, where the framework set out in these pages is taught to clinicians, educators, community leaders, and anyone willing to learn to look. Each morning Dr. Farber puts on a kippah, a deliberate act of visibility in a world that increasingly asks Jews to disappear. He and Lori count their five children and five grandchildren as the achievement that outshines every other.

Physician . Researcher . Witness