Rabbi Walter Jacob was born in Augsburg, Germany in 1930 into a rabbinic lineage stretching back hundreds of years in continental Europe. His family fled their homeland with the rise of the Nazi Party and settled in Springfield, Missouri. Following four decades as a pulpit rabbi at Rodef Shalom Congregation in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and a Jewish scholar of international renown, Jacob returned to Germany to found the Abraham Geiger College and ordain the first rabbis in the country since the end of World War II.

Through interviews and archival research, The Seventeenth Generation chronicles the career of an unheralded leader in Jewish history and shows how a lifetime of modesty and forbearance produced unexpectedly rich innovations and grand accomplishments.