[1][2][3] His sisters are Wendy, a county commissioner in Durham, North Carolina, and Ellen, a psychotherapist in Manhattan, New York City.
[4] He graduated from Columbia High School, and from New York University, where he studied architecture and urban design.
[2][7] He served as press secretary for Tom Duane during his successful run for the New York City Council in 1991.
[2] Jacobs contributed to the Associated Press, Village Voice, and New York Newsday during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.
In 2002, he was part of a team of reporters who won a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for coverage of the September 11 attacks in Manhattan.
[1][4][5][17][18][19] It is about a group of elderly Jewish Holocaust survivors spending the summer at a 44-acre (180,000 m2) vacation bungalow colony in Ellenville in the Catskills in upstate New York prior to the property being sold.