The answer, according to Dara Horn, is not simply that American Jews don’t care. She writes:

The reason American Jews don’t learn Hebrew is because they think they can’t. And I understand why. For much of my life, Hebrew scared me. This became rather inconvenient while I was pursuing graduate studies in Hebrew literature. But I had reasons to be scared. . . .

You see, I already knew that I could never actually learn Hebrew—real Hebrew, fluent Hebrew, Hebrew where you could understand Israeli TV—simply because only three kinds of American Jews were allowed to learn Hebrew, and I wasn’t any of them.

First, I wasn’t Orthodox. No one was sending me to a gap-year yeshiva; no one I knew threw around Hebrew phrases; no one I knew went on aliyah. Second, I never lived in Israel and had no relatives there. . . . And third, I never went to a Jewish school. . . .

It is now very unclear to me why more American Jews do not learn Hebrew. The excuses about assimilation and so forth do not explain why already-committed Jews do not learn Hebrew better, or why we are letting supposed impossibilities stand in our way. And now is exactly the moment when a massive initiative encouraging Diaspora Jews to learn Hebrew might actually work. With Israel’s high-tech energy, and with the Israeli government’s eagerness to draw in Diaspora Jews, shouldn’t there be an app for that?

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.