“Poem without End,” by the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, opens with the image of an “old synagogue” housed inside a “brand-new museum.” Using this image as her point of departure, Sarah Rindner explores the place of the Jewish religion in Amichai’s work:

For Amichai, the synagogue is not merely a relic from an outdated past; rather, it lives [on], and he lives inside it. Moreover, the synagogue lives within him and so on, creating the never-ending cycle of the poem’s title.

Amichai, famously, identified as secular but grew up in an Orthodox Jewish home and tirelessly engaged with Jewish history, rituals, and texts. It is easy, then, to understand his connection with the world of the synagogue, but the significance of the “museum” that “dwells within his heart” is less clear. . . .

[P]erhaps Amichai is invoking the museum as a representation of “high” culture, a place in which religious belief and practice are concretized and turned into art. [If so, then] it is not just [that] the Jewish faith is embedded in the poet’s heart, but that [Judaism] is also somehow itself linked to artistic or literary expression. . . . This engagement with Judaism via art becomes inextricable from Amichai’s own self as a Jew and a poet, and is then folded back into the substance of the religion itself, as represented by the synagogue.

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.