Di Goldene Kallah (“The Golden Bride”) premiered on New York’s Lower East Side in 1923 to a packed audience and remained a staple of the Yiddish stage until after World War II. The New York-based National Yiddish Theater-Folksbiene now has plans to revive it. Joshua Barone writes:

In the operetta, a beautiful young woman named Goldele, who was abandoned as a child, receives an unexpected inheritance and sets off on a journey to claim her estate, find her mother, and offer her hand to the man who can help.

[The play] dropped out of the New York theater scene after 1948. The main reason: “People just stopped speaking Yiddish,” said Michael Ochs, a musicologist who discovered the remnants of the operetta’s score and libretto about 25 years ago, . . . while working at the Harvard Library.

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.