Reviewing an exhibition of 20th-century Anglo-Jewish art, David Herman notes two very different trends (with pictures):

The . . . artists who were born around 1890 and emerged just before World War I, [known as the] Whitechapel Boys—including Mark Gertler, David Bomberg, Jacob Kramer, and Isaac Rosenberg—were all sons of Jewish immigrants from the Russian Pale. They were drawn to traditional Jewish subjects: for example, Gertler’s Rabbi and Rabbitzin (1914), Kramer’s Day of Atonement (1919), and Bomberg’s Ghetto Theatre (1920). . . .

What is striking, [however], about the second wave [of Jewish artists], who dominate this exhibition—Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied central Europe, [including] refugees who came as children like Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach—is how they avoided Jewish subjects. No images of Judaism, almost no traces of the Holocaust, hardly any engagement with Israel. Until recently, most postwar work by Jewish artists has avoided obviously Jewish subjects. But there is nevertheless something dark and troubling about the solitary figures by Freud, the urban landscapes and thick black swirls of charcoal by Auerbach and [Leon] Kossoff. To use David Sylvester’s phrase, these works by Jewish artists are “the art of an aftermath.”

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.