In his recent Hebrew book, Here Dwells the Jewish People, the Israeli literary critic Avraham Novershtern presents a comprehensive theory of American Yiddish literature in all its variety, focusing on its “coherence” and “complexity.” David Roskies writes in his review:

By shleymut (coherence), Novershtern means that Yiddish literature and culture is a world unto itself. Novershtern emphatically rejects a comparative approach, which examines Yiddish within the multiethnic or multilingual expanse of American literary culture writ large. These comparative approaches . . . have yet to shed new light on any linguistic corpus in particular, and merely confirm what we already know about the fate of all immigrant literatures on American soil. Novershtern instead marshals impressive evidence that American Yiddish cultural production cannot be studied in isolation from its other two major centers, Poland and the USSR. . . . As a cultural artifact created by and for immigrants, the give-and-take between Old World and New would prove to be the most permanent and productive vein of American-Yiddish literature.

[Novershtern’s other interpretive category], murkavut (complexity), means that the needs and aspirations of both producers and consumers of this culture were contradictory and dynamic. The relationship between Old World and New was fiercely oedipal, exploitative, and competitive. For every paean to America there are a dozen counterexamples. For every expression of nostalgia for the Jewish past there is an expression of rebellion and rejection. When closely examined, the very phrase, “here dwells the Jewish people,” taken from a poem by H. Leivick, bespeaks the love-hate relationship of the poet toward the Yiddish-speaking masses. The poet is both insider and outsider; looking with a critical eye at “the inner workings of Jewish existence,” he stands at a visible remove therefrom, “even though, fundamentally, he ought to be considered flesh of its flesh.” The poet’s cognitive map of the American-Yiddish polity, moreover, so clearly inspired by [New York’s] Lower East Side, owes far more to the remembered past than it does to the lived present.

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.