Commentary There are many lessons to be drawn from last Saturday’s hostage crisis at Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas. First, reports that Malik Faisal Akram’s antisemitic hostage-taking had disrupted Beth Israel’s livestreamed Shabbat services proved more prescient than those reporters perhaps realized. Orthodox Judaism does not permit electronic streaming on the Sabbath, and it was revealed that Beth Israel is a Reform synagogue. This is relevant because Reform Judaism is not merely theologically liberal in the extreme, discarding the binding authority of Jewish law and placing an obtuse focus on the concept of “tikkun olam” (“repair of the world”), but is so uniformly politically progressive as to be a de facto wing of the Democratic Party itself. Sure enough, Itamar Gelbman, a conservative former congregant at Beth Israel, wrote a viral Facebook post divulging that the rabbi had denounced Israel as an “apartheid state” and precluded congregants from concealed …
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