At the annual Pro Musica Hebraica concert last week, the Amernet String Quartert, along with the mezzo-soprano Rachel Calloway and the guitarist Adam Levin, performed a series of pieces based on traditional Jewish melodies with their roots in medieval Spain. Grace Jean writes in her review:

Because Spanish Jews preserved their culture through oral traditions, Sephardi music was rarely written down, but rather passed between generations through singing. The composer Alberto Hemsi (1898–1975) sought to capture the songs he heard in his travels, ultimately publishing ten volumes of melodies.

Inspired by Hemsi’s efforts, the composer Ljova (Lev Zhurbin) . . . arranged “Blanca Nina,” a suite of traditional songs and ballads. For this world premiere, Calloway sang with haunting presence while Amernet proved an equal partner in depicting a young woman’s life in Sephardi Spain.

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.