It certainly wasn't any deep pool of radicalized Jewish sentiment in central Florida that spawned Goldstein's conspiracy, Sheskin told The Forward in a 2003 interview. "I think it might be just one of those random things," he says, an accident of nature. There was a similar case in 1997 involving Harry Shapiro, a Kosher butcher from the similarly assimilated city of Jacksonville. Shapiro was sentenced to 10 years in prison for a 1997 plot to bomb a conservative synagogue to prevent former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres from speaking there. The bomb turned out to be a dud.

As Sheskin told The Forward, "The Jewish community in the section of Central Florida that Goldstein called home, is not a place where Jewish identity is particularly strong, and its certainly not the kind of place one would expect to breed radicals. There is no unusually deep well of tradition, nor is there an unusually strong undercurrent of anti-Semitism. It is, by virtually, every measure, average."

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Nor did Goldstein personally stand out as a particularly nationalistic Jew. In fact, as fellow physicians told the BBC not long after Goldstein's arrest, the nondescript little doctor didn't really stand out at all.

As the Associated Press reported in a March 2, 2003, story on the arrest, friends and neighbors generally regarded Goldstein as "a regular guy who manned a suburban podiatry practice and tooled around in a black Porsche Boxter," purchased with the proceeds of his $144,000-a-year practice. "He and Kristi lived in a lakefront townhouse complex near his office, where she worked alongside him," The AP report continued. It is almost a cliché in the news business there's always a quote from the neighbors saying that the accused "was a quiet man," or offer that they'd often see "him mowing his lawn," and the Goldstein case was no exception. As the Associated Press reported at the time, "his neighbors say he was pleasant enough, often acknowledging them with a friendly wave and dropping in on their barbecues."