The Jewish Museum in New York City is currently mounting an exhibit entitled The Power of Pictures: Early Soviet Photography, Early Soviet Films. In her review, Frances Brent notes that the exhibit—although in many ways well executed—does not properly draw attention to the outsized role Jews played in early Soviet photography, or the Jewish identities of most of the artists whose work is on display:

[Take, for instance], El Lissitzky, whose experiments with photographs and mastery of photomontage grew out of the Jewish and Russian avant-garde. Lissitzky was a protean talent, and there were many iterations to his career. As a teenager he studied painting in Vitebsk with [Marc] Chagall’s teacher Yehudah Pen. He trained in Germany and later Moscow as an architect before taking part in Jewish ethnographic expeditions. He illustrated both Russian and Yiddish books—most famously Ḥad gadya, [an illustrated version of the traditional Passover song]. Under the influence of [Kazimir] Malevich he became a Suprematist and, after that, a constructivist in Moscow. From 1921 to 1925 he lived in Germany and Switzerland and experimented with printmaking, typography, and book design, adding the new techniques of photo-collage and photomontage to his repertoire.

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.