Reviewing a recently published collection of Primo Levi’s works translated into English, Ian Thomson examines the successes and failures of various attempts to render the writings of the Italian chemist and Holocaust survivor into other languages. Thomson also tells of Levi’s early postwar business trips to Germany:

Levi displayed no obvious rancor during his first trip to Germany in 1953. On the contrary, he was keen to practice the German he had learned so imperfectly at Auschwitz. . . . By the time of his second visit in July 1954, however, Levi was in an antagonistic mood. He . . . wanted to meet a former Nazi and went out of his way to ruffle sensibilities by introducing himself: “Levi, how do you do,” carefully articulating the Jewish surname first.

Levi had already glimpsed an unpleasant instinct lurking beneath the polite surface of the Bayer headquarters outside Cologne, when an employee observed that it was “most unusual” for an Italian to speak German. Levi countered: “My name is Levi. I am a Jew, and I learned your language at Auschwitz.” A stuttering apology was followed by silence. Levi could hardly pretend that he was in a normal business relationship with post-Hitler Germany.

Levi’s most dramatic encounter—what he later called “the hour of colloquy”—took place one lunchtime at Bayer’s guesthouse on Kaiser-Wilhelm-Allee. He was seated at the dining table in shirtsleeves and making small talk when a director asked him about the 174517 tattoo exposed on his forearm. Levi instantly replied: “It’s a memento of Auschwitz.” [The daughter of Levi’s boss, who had accompanied them on the trip], recalled the scene: “All one could hear was a polite clatter of forks on plates as ten Germans—all men—shifted awkwardly in their seats.”

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.