Commentary
During the Jewish Passover holiday, the alleged Highland Park Fourth of July Parade shooter tried to enter a synagogue. He was turned away by the synagogue’s rabbi. That rabbi, Yosef Schanowitz, recalled the incident when he saw the picture of the suspected Highland Park shooter released to news services.
Highland Park is an affluent suburb about 25 miles from downtown Chicago. The community has a large Jewish population, around 50 percent of the suburb’s population. At the moment the shooter’s first rounds hit people in the Fourth of July Parade, the Maxwell Street Klezmer Band was riding on a flatbed truck in the parade playing a traditional Jewish Klezmer wedding song. Klezmer is a musical tradition of the Ashkenazi Jews of Central and Eastern Europe and has become popular today in Europe and the United States….