The musician and vocalist Yair Harel performs Sephardi and North African piyyutim (religious poems), basing his arrangements on traditional melodies. He has also been involved in creating educational resources to preserve and disseminate information about these songs and their history. In an interview with Sephardi Ideas Monthly, he discusses their appeal:

The music is melodic, dynamic, and even ecstatic. It’s rooted in popular music of the past and also includes a variety of influences—Spanish, Arab, African, Amazigh (Berber), and, of course, Jewish—so there are different musical elements that engage and communicate with the audience. Most deeply, for Jews today, the music facilitates a spiritual language that people are looking for. It gives voice to prayer. . . .

Historically, piyyut absorbed popular music from the surrounding environment. Take the piyyutim of Rabbi Israel Najara [ca. 1555–1625]. Najara lived in the cosmopolitan Ottoman empire and converted popular love songs into piyyutim that then became part of the ritual lifecycle. This meant that the piyyutim were sung in various contexts, from the synagogue to the Shabbat table to wedding parties. So the music was popular before it even entered the synagogue. . . . Then, once it became part of the religious ritual it assumed the status of sacred song, or prayer, which also affected the way it was musically performed. If it succeeded in touching people’s hearts across the generations, it became part of the tradition and was preserved.

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.