The 19th-century English novelist Anthony Trollope created no small number of Jewish characters, many but not all of them portrayed in an unflattering light. Ann Marlow attributes Trollope’s interest in Jews to his own insecurity as a member of a poor but genteel family who spent much of his life struggling to improve his financial situation:

[T]here is nasty anti-Semitism in Trollope’s depictions of Jews, but there is also identification. . . . In Phineas Redux (1873), the gallant Madame Marie Max Goesler (the widow of a Jew, if not definitely Jewish herself) faces off against the evil Dr. Emilius, saving the politician Phineas Finn from the gallows—and ends by becoming his second wife. One critic, Shirley Letwin, has argued that Madame Goesler is actually the most perfect “gentleman” in Trollope. . . .

[F]or Trollope, the profession of writing novels involved at least one stereotypical Jewish trait. In The Prime Minister, . . . the upright old gentleman Mr. Wharton refuses to allow the marriage of his daughter to the evil Ferdinand Lopez, a Jew. Trollope comments editorially that the world no longer cared whether men had “the fair skin and bold eyes and uncertain words of an English gentleman or the swarthy color and false grimace and glib tongue of some inferior Latin race.” Professionally, Trollope certainly is with the people of the glib tongue, not the stammering gentlefolk. There is perhaps no 19th-century English novelist as “glib” as Trollope. . . .

As [his] autobiography makes clear, the young Trollope had come close to falling off the class ladder. . . . For Trollope, Jews stand outside the inherited social order, creating themselves by their work—much as he did, and as he was half-ashamed, half-proud of doing.

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.