February 22, 2026 Book Talk: American Reich: A Murder in Orange County, Neo-Nazis, and a New Age of Hate

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Join us on Sunday, February 22, 2026 at Hebrew College’s collaborative campus when campus partner Temple Reyim hosts a book talk with author Eric Lichtblau about his new book, American Reich: A Murder in Orange County, Neo-Nazis, and a New Age of Hate. Lichtblau is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and was a reporter for the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.

The book presents the decade-long surge in violent bigotry and hate crimes by white supremacists in America, especially against Jewish, Black, LGBTQ and immigrant communities. The book has been featured on NPR’s “Fresh Air,” and many other media outlets; the New York Times review called it “ambitious (and) deeply reported” and “an admirably vivid job” of dissecting the white supremacy movement, and Publishers Weekly described it as “kaleidoscopic … a troubling window into the rage that animates America’s shadowy far-right networks.”

Questions?

Please contact Becca Wolter-Gustafson at [email protected] or 617-275-8804.

This event is co-sponsored by Hebrew College.

More about the book

One night in early 2018, while he was home from college, an Ivy League student named Blaze Bernstein snuck out of his parents’ house in Orange County. Waiting for him in a car outside was an old high-school classmate: Sam Woodward, someone who Blaze mostly remembered as a brooding, bigoted loner. But that night, after months of flirtatious messaging, Sam had succeeded in coaxing Blaze—a gay, Jewish sophomore at UPenn—out for a rendezvous. No one would ever see him alive again.

In American Reich, veteran investigative journalist Eric Lichtblau uses the story of Blaze’s life and death to shine a light on the epidemic of hate in Southern California and, increasingly, the nation as a whole. Orange County has long been a bastion of the ultra-right: carved out of farmland as a haven for wealthy whites fleeing the diversifying metropolis to the north, it was the birthplace of the far-right John Birch Society, a hub for neo-Nazi recruitment, and a powerful springboard for race-baiting Republican politicians including Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. But in the years leading up to Blaze’s disappearance, Orange County was changing: like the country as a whole, it was rapidly diversifying, to the outrage of many of its white residents. No one was more opposed to the changes than America’s resurgent neo-Nazi groups, one of which had recently gained a new member: Sam Woodward.

Revealing how Orange County has exported racial hatred to the rest of the country and the world, American Reich weaves this tragic tale together with stories from across the nation, showing what this haunted place and the colliding paths of two of its residents reveal about America’s fractured soul and our hope for healing.

About the author

Eric Lichtblau is a two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and the best-selling author of The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men, and Bush’s Law: The Remaking of American Justice. Lichtblau was a Washington reporter for the New York Times for 15 years and for  the Los Angeles Times for 15 years before that. He has also written during his career for the New Yorker, TIME, and other publications, reporting extensively on national security, terrorism, law enforcement, civil rights, political corruption, war crimes, and other issues.

He earned a Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for stories revealing the existence of a secret NSA wiretapping program approved after the Sept. 11 attacks, and a second Pulitzer in 2017 as part of a team investigating links between the Trump administration and Russia in the 2016 campaign.He has been a frequent guest on NPR, MSNBC, C-SPAN, and other networks, as well as a speaker at many and institutions.