In today’s popular imagination, American Jews and guns, or violence, don’t go together. Fighting is seen as the business of Israeli Jews. Adam Kirsch reviews two novels and a collection of short stories that with varying success portray gun-wielding Jews. About the last, Jewish Noir, he writes:

These stories vary widely in quality and interest, but they have in common a certain aroma of wish-fulfillment. If the violence in Jewish Noir is frequently tongue-in-cheek, that is because violence is for most of these writers something purely imaginary and cinematic—more [Quentin] Tarantino than [Isaac] Babel. In the absence of actual violent anti-Semitism, of the kind that terrorized Jews for centuries, it is easy for American Jews to enjoy dreaming about beating up, stabbing, or shooting fantasy anti-Semites. There is a tendency in American Jewish literature to react against a legacy of Jewish passivity—in particular, against the image of Jews [supposedly] going “like sheep to the slaughter” in the Holocaust—by glamorizing violence. But the glamorizing of violence is a habit of comfortable civilians, not of actual soldiers—or actual victims.

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.