Born in Poland in 1894, and immigrating to the U.S. in 1940, Artur Szyk was a talented and versatile artist whose work appeared in the New York Post and on the covers of both Time and the Manhattan phonebook—among many other publications. He was a lifelong Zionist and a committed patriot of both his native and adopted countries. J. Hoberman reviews an exhibit of his work currently on display at the New-York Historical Society, which he calls “a jewel box overflowing with concentrated gem-like images of Jewish heroes and Nazi monsters.” (The exhibit runs until January 21, 2018.)

Most of Szyk’s images were made for reproduction in books, magazines, and newspapers. To see the originals, many of which are surprisingly small opaque watercolors (or gouaches), is to be dazzled by the painter’s technique and the fact that he evidently worked without a magnifying glass.

Szyk is a singular figure in 20th-century art—at once a remarkable craftsman, a political activist, a successful commercial artist, a ferocious cartoonist, and the inventor of a style closer to medieval illuminated manuscripts than any sort of contemporary expression. He was also an unabashed propagandist with a taste for patriotic pomp and sturdy Muskeljuden [“muscular Jews”]. . . .

Although he is best known now for his illuminated Haggadah, produced during the late 1930s, Szyk was even more celebrated during the period of World War II. Then, close to ubiquitous, with his work regularly featured in national magazines, he was America’s most dogged, and perhaps most prominent, anti-fascist artist. . . . A close friend of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, providing illustrations for his novel Samson the Nazirite, [Szyk] was a fervent supporter of Franklin Roosevelt as well as an advocate for Jabotinsky’s [acolyte], Peter Bergson. . . .

Where the irrepressible [Marc] Chagall created a wildly successful synthesis of expressionism, fauvism, cubism, and invented folk art, Szyk’s images, some taken from the book of Esther, were precise and self-contained—as decorative, symmetrical, and intricately patterned as Oriental rugs. Although, like Chagall, Szyk would paint Jesus as a symbol of Jewish suffering, he was more traditional and also more political: one of his major works was a triptych of Jewish martyrdom in tsarist Russia, medieval Spain, and Roman-occupied Palestine.

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.