Attending a panel discussion at Jewish Book Week, the British actress Maureen Lipman found herself taking an outspoken position on the subject:

The director Polly Findlay spoke about casting an Israeli Arab as Shylock in her production of The Merchant of Venice, feeling that an understanding of the [character’s] outsider status is key to the role. Curious, I asked how it is that non-Jewish actors are often cast as Shylock, when rarely—since [Laurence] Olivier in 1965—has Othello been played by someone white. Shylock and his daughter are clearly identified as Jewish, so why would Jewish actors not be the director’s first port of call?

An audience member was shocked by my question. “So you’d expect a gay character to be played by a gay actor?” I had to think. “Preferably, yes,” I said, causing further shockwaves. “But surely,” I was challenged, “don’t you just get the best actor for the role?”

Yes, of course, but if fine gay actors exist (and they do) why would you not cast them? Not that Michael Douglas and Matt Damon didn’t convince as Liberace and his lover in Behind the Candelabra, . . . [but], were I an openly gay actor whose name would green-light a film, I would probably feel discriminated against.

It’s an interesting question. . . . Should I be grateful for the number of great Jewish characters I have played—or sad that in a 50-year career I’ve rarely played a “classic” role?

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.