The portrait of the Jewish gangster Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby, along with other passages and comments in his writings, suggest that F. Scott Fitzgerald was less than well-disposed toward Jews. But in the last year of his life he employed a Jewish secretary—Frances Kroll Ring, who died last month—and was involved with a Jewish woman. Arthur Krystal suggests they might have changed his attitude:

In the summer of 1939 [around the time he hired Ring], Fitzgerald started to work in earnest on his Hollywood novel, the unfinished The Last Tycoon, in which the hero, Monroe Stahr, is based on Irving Thalberg. Although Stahr’s Jewishness is occasionally alluded to, it’s never disparaged. At one point, a director gazes . . . at Stahr and muses, “He had worked with Jews too long to believe legends that they were small with money.” Elsewhere, the narrator describes Stahr enigmatically as “a rationalist who did his own reasoning without benefit of books—and had just managed to climb out of a thousand years of Jewry into the late 18th century.” It’s hard to know what Fitzgerald meant by this. Was Stahr among the few Jews capable of making the transition from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment? In that case, the remark has a distinctly condescending flavor. And why the tail end of the Enlightenment rather than the middle? Every once in a while, you have to wonder if maybe Hemingway was right: Fitzgerald really “couldn’t think.”

That line aside, there’s no trace of anti-Semitism in the novel. Stahr is admirable in almost every respect. . . . It might be that Fitzgerald was now compensating for his distasteful portrayal of Wolfsheim, or maybe he didn’t want to be labeled anti-Semitic in an industry populated by Jews, or maybe he was mindful of what was going on in Europe in 1939. Or just maybe the fact that he spent the greater part of his days and nights with two Jewish women contributed to his portrait of Stahr.

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.