A 736-page anthology of the short stories of Cynthia Ozick—one of the great American Jewish writers of the past half-century—has recently appeared in Spanish. Rikki Novetsky comments:

This new translation of Ozick’s own stories [into Spanish] is apropos for a writer who was obsessed with the implications of translation and language choice. In “Preface to Bloodshed,” Ozick’s introductory essay to the collection Bloodshed & Three Novellas, she argues that English is an inherently Christian language, and cannot accommodate the themes she wishes to relate in her uniquely Jewish fiction. Of course she has no other choice but to write in her mother tongue: “What is English language (and its poetry) if not my passion, my blood, my life? . . . Still, though English is my everything, now and then I feel cramped by it.”. . .

In Ozick’s short story “Envy; Or Yiddish in America,” she writes about Hershel Edelshtein, an aging Yiddish poet seeking a translator so he can enter mainstream American culture. Perhaps Ozick would now smile at the letter Edelshtein receives upon being rejected by a translator he attempts to hire: “Though your poetry may well be the quality you claim for it, practically, reputation must precede translation.”

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.