Micrography, the use of miniature writing to draw shapes and pictures, has been a Jewish art form for over a millennium. Traditionally, the letters spell out biblical verses and form images of biblical scenes or religious objects. But Louis Rotblat, a Polish-born Jew who made his way first to England and later to New York, used micrography to draw portraits, including of two of the greatest figures of the American Yiddish theater: the playwrights Abraham Goldfaden and Jacob Gordin. David Mazower writes:

[Rotblat] had a genius for creating micrographs—minutely detailed compositions made up of thousands of tiny letters that appear whole from a distance but fracture and dissolve when viewed close up.

This unique form of Jewish folk art has a long history . . . and is still being practiced today. A micrographic artist needs the compositional skills of an architectural draughtsman, the fearlessness of a tattooist, and the flowing hand of an artist. Plus the fluency and stamina of the sofer, the Torah scribe, the occupation that many micrographers followed.

Rotblat created his first known micrographic portrait in London in 1897. It paid tribute to . . . Abraham Goldfaden, the founding father of the Yiddish stage. The Goldfaden micrograph . . . uses thousands of words from the text of the biblical operetta Shulamis, one of the most popular of all Goldfaden plays. In similar vein, his 1909 portrait of Jacob Gordin was also minutely detailed and was based on the text of a hugely popular play. This time it was Gordon’s Mirele Efros, also known as The Jewish Queen Lear.

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.