On Lincoln’s birthday, 1966, a young man stood on the altar of a multi-million dollar synagogue in suburban Detroit and confronted his audience of 700 with a gun he would soon use to commit murder and suicide. He called the congregation a travesty and an abomination and said its phoniness and hypocrisy had betrayed the beauty and spirit of Judaism. “It is composed of people,” said the young man, “who on the whole make me ashamed to say that I’m a Jew. For the most part it is composed of men, women and children who care for nothing except their vain, egotistical selves. With this act I protest a humanly horrifying and hence unacceptable situation.” Then he turned and shot his friend and mentor Rabbi Morris Adler in cold blood.

This true crime classic is a precise and harrowing account of the descent into madness of 23-year-old Richard Wishnetsky, a Phi Beta Kappa scholar at the University of Michigan and a Woodrow Wilson Fellow bound for the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. It culminates in Richard’s assassination of Rabbi Adler, a learned and charismatic man who was one of the nation’s most prominent religious leaders. The book offers an insightful look at modern Jewish life and explores Wishnetsky’s criminal mind as he settled on the rabbi as the appropriate target of his deepest rage.

“I was absolutely enthralled by it. It’s one of those non-fiction novels that one simply cannot put down.” –Robert Coles, Pulitzer Prize-winning author

“A fascinating double-portrait of the Rabbi and his killer that holds the reader spellbound from beginning to end.”—Rabbi Jack Riemer, known as “President Clinton’s rabbi”