[2] A Wiccan high priestess,[1] Adler wrote Drawing Down the Moon,[3] a seminal[citation needed] work on neopaganism in America.

She was also the only child of her mother Freyda Nacque Adler (née Pasternack) who was the daughter of uneducated immigrants, both of whom were dead by the time Margot was born.

[5] In her autobiographical account of growing up in the 1960s, Heretic's Heart, she branded herself, “an alien in America.”[5]: 42  Her paternal grandfather had been a personal friend of Leon Trotsky’s.

[5]: 39 Margot grew up in Manhattan where she attended the liberal City and Country School in Greenwich Village, “my utopia, and the place that remained whole and intact and vibrant, even when my own family fell apart” [5]: 55 .

Margot referred to the apartment as her bit of heaven on earth, high up on the western edge of Central Park with a view of the city.

She embraced it, drawn to issues, feeling matters deeply to the point where she willingly went to jail for 90 days for her protests in FSM when she might have escaped her punishment.

She stopped en route in Little Rock, (where she had been born while her father was stationed there during the Second World War) to visit a family friend who lived in an all-white neighborhood and who shared with Margot her regret at the recent school desegregation in that city.

They wrote 200 pages of letters between the spring of 1967 to later that year when they finally met after he returned in October from a war he didn’t support but had had to fight to survive.

[5]: 177 After graduating from Berkeley Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in political science,[12] she chose to pursue a career in journalism and was accepted into the Master’s Program at Columbia University.

She and a friend, as part of their studies, joined the Venceremos Brigade harvesting sugar in Cuba to support the Cuban revolution and to counter the crippling impact of the USA's economic embargo against the country.

Adler joined NPR in 1979 as a general assignment reporter, after spending a year as an NPR freelance reporter covering New York City, and subsequently worked on a great many pieces dealing with subjects as diverse as the death penalty, the right to die movement, the response to the war in Kosovo, computer gaming, the drug ecstasy, geek culture, children and technology and Pokémon.

She agreed with the historian James Breasted's characterization of monotheism as “imperialism in religion.”[3] Her second book, Heretic's Heart: A Journey Through Spirit and Revolution, was published by Beacon Press in 1997.

They were married in a pagan ritual that took place on Martha’s Vineyard where Margot had loved family vacations with her parents as a child.

“Their wedding was the first Pagan handfasting to be written up in the society pages of The New York Times.” Margot and John had one child, a son born in 1990.