The Case That Shook the Rabbinate
Joe Eskenazi
November 20, 2003
\”The Rabbi and the Hit Man,\” by Arthur J. Magida (HarperCollins, $24.95).
If not for the legion of pederast priests unmasked like some gruesome ecclesiastical episode of \”Scooby Doo,\” Rabbi Fred Neulander might have been a shoo-in for \”most infamous religious figure of the past decade.\”
Now, it\’s a toss-up. So be it.
Yet after tearing through Arthur J. Magida\’s \”The Rabbi and the Hit Man,\” the painstakingly detailed account of the rise and fall of Neulander, a philandering New Jersey rabbi who paid an assassin to bludgeon his wife to death in 1994, one can only lapse into a well-worn cliché. Truth is stranger than fiction.
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