Shlomo-Zaynvl Rapaport (1863–1920), best known by his pen name S. An-Sky, was a leading figure in the Russian socialist movement, a supporter of Zionism, a great Jewish ethnographer, and the author of the classic Yiddish play The Dybbuk. His novel, Pioneers, about the experience of late-19th-century Russian Jews shedding religious observance to embrace modernity and the Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment movement), has recently been rendered into English by Michael R. Katz. Polly Zavadivker writes in her review:

What makes [the novel’s characters] compelling . . . is not so much their zealous quest for enlightenment as the doubts that plague them as they set out to remake themselves. [The protagonist] guiltily questions himself after he casts off his familiar garb: has he acted too rashly, made superficial changes that simply mask an old worldview, speech, and thoughts still intact beneath the surface? As he observes others in [his] circle break off ties with their disapproving families, and witnesses an aggrieved mother lose her son to [join a group of “enlightened” Jews], he doubts whether their cause is so righteous as to justify such suffering. An-sky’s sympathetic portrayal of the emotional and mental anxiety bred by this process of rupture surely must have reflected his own inner conflicts as a young man.

Adding further irony to the pioneers’ quest to master the world of Russian letters is their discovery of an abiding love for their native languages. In the course of a raucous debate about Russian radical thought, they revert to Yiddish and use sing-song methods of talmudic study as they take apart the writings of [the Russian radical authors] Dmitrii Pisarev and Nikolai Chernyshevskii.

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.