Daniel Israel (disambiguation)

Daniel L. Israel was the former president of Pontiac-based Asphalt Specialists LLC. In October 2023, he pleaded guilty to conspiring with Al’s Asphalt Paving Company Inc. and employees of the two companies to rig bids for Michigan asphalt-paving contracts.[1][2]

According to court documents summarized by the U.S. Department of Justice, the conspirators coordinated prices so that a company designated to lose would submit an intentionally noncompetitive bid, giving customers a false impression of competition. Israel participated in the conspiracy from March 2013 through November 2018. On May 23, 2025, the department reported that he had been sentenced to six months in prison and a $500,000 fine. He was one of seven individuals charged in an investigation that had produced more than $8.2 million in criminal fines at that time.[1]

Daniel Israel Arnon was born in Poland in 1910. He earned a B.Sc. in 1932 and a Ph.D. in plant physiology in 1936 from the University of California, Berkeley, where he later became a professor of cell physiology and biochemistry.[3] Apart from military service and sabbatical leaves in England, Sweden, Germany, Switzerland, and Pacific Grove, California, he spent his career at Berkeley.[3]

After military service in World War II, Arnon established and directed an experimental nutrient-culture center on Ascension Island in the mid-Atlantic for the U.S. Army Air Corps.[3] His early research examined how plants use trace elements, including molybdenum and vanadium, and led him to begin studying photosynthesis in 1948. From 1951 until his death in 1994, he concentrated on photosynthesis.[3]

Arnon's central contribution to science was demonstrating how light energy absorbed by chlorophyll is converted into chemical energy in the form of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), a process he named photophosphorylation, or photosynthetic phosphorylation.[3] He was also credited as the first scientist to demonstrate complete photosynthesis outside a living cell.[3] During the 1950s, Arnon and other American biochemists prepared plant-cell fragments capable of carrying out both the Hill reaction and the synthesis of ATP. They used the coenzyme NADP as the final electron acceptor, replacing the nonphysiological electron acceptors employed in Robin Hill's earlier work.[4]

Arnon's honors included membership in the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Arts and Sciences, election as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1962, and membership in international learned societies.[3]

Daniel Israel López Laguna was born around 1660 in France as a Marrano.[5] He traveled to Spain while young and was imprisoned by the Inquisition. After his release and escape to Jamaica, he used the Jewish name Daniel Israel.[5]

During his suffering and imprisonment, López Laguna turned to the Psalms for comfort and hope.[5] He rendered the Psalms into Spanish verse to make them accessible to others, especially Marranos who did not know Hebrew.[5] The work was published in London in 1720 under the title Espejo fiel de vidas que contiene los Salmos de David en verso, corresponding to the Jewish year 5480.[6] When he brought the psalter to London, three Jewish poetesses—Sarah de Fonseca Pinto y Pimentel, Manuela Nuñez da Almeida, and Bienvenida Coen Belmonte—addressed him in verses composed in Latin, English, Portuguese, and Spanish.[5]

López Laguna's Spanish Psalter connected his experience of persecution with an effort to make Jewish scripture available to readers who had been separated from Hebrew learning.[5][6]

Daniel Israel Bonafoux was a Chazan, or officiating reader, at Smyrna and a follower of Sabbatai Zevi.[5] Heinrich Graetz's account states that after Zevi's death, Bonafoux continued to encourage belief in him, including through claims of visions and supernatural messages. The Smyrna community secured his banishment from the city, after which he lived nearby and continued encouraging Zevi's followers.[5]