At least until the 1970s, academic students of the Bible tended to disconnect it from Judaism. Thus, the founder of higher biblical criticism, Julius Wellhausen, made it his goal to find a Protestant inner core buried among later pharisaic, legalistic, and priestly accretions. Later Bible critics, writes Benjamin Sommer, “created a firewall between biblical religion and Jewish culture” by insisting “that it is illegitimate to use rabbinic lenses to look at the Bible, it is pointless to use rabbinic commentaries, and it is perverse to think about the Bible in terms of classical Jewish ideas or values.” According to Sommer, three scholars, all of them Conservative rabbis as well as academics, can take credit for breaking down this firewall and creating a biblical scholarship rooted in critical methods but capable of speaking to believing Jews:

Yochanan Muffs, Moshe Greenberg, and Jacob Milgrom believe[d] that it makes sense to study the Bible in a Jewish context, as part of an ongoing Jewish conversation. To achieve a deeper understanding of the Bible, scholars can and should utilize not only modern critical tools such as archaeology and linguistics but also rabbinic midrash [and] the work of medieval Jewish interpreters (many of whom were themselves superb linguists). Thus, all three of them brought the classical Jewish interpreters back into conversations about the Bible among modern scholars. In so doing, they made clear to their colleagues in the academic world that the Bible is (among other things) a Jewish book. At the same time, they demonstrated something crucial to their fellow Jews (and especially their rabbinic and educational colleagues): Jews who want to study the Bible as their scriptures have much to gain by turning to certain modern scholars. . . .

When one pages through any of Milgrom’s commentaries, [for instance], it immediately becomes clear that he perceives strong elements of continuity between the Bible and Jewish culture in the same way that modern scholars have long perceived continuities between the Bible and ancient Near Eastern cultures. For this reason, in his quest to understand difficult texts from Leviticus and Numbers, Milgrom utilizes comparisons and insights from both rabbinic literature and literature written in Akkadian, Ugaritic, and Hittite (languages of ancient Mesopotamia, northern Canaan, and Asia Minor, respectively). . . .

By using insights he gleans from both types of literature, Milgrom places the Bible on a long trajectory that moves backward from the Bible to the ancient Near East and forward toward rabbinic Judaism. Milgrom shows that just as earlier literature is relevant for understanding the Bible (even though some of it predates the biblical texts by a millennium), so, too, rabbinic works edited a thousand years after the biblical era can enhance our understanding of the Bible.

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.