While the prominent role of Jews in the early years of Hollywood is well known, more obscure is the part played by Jews in the founding of “Bollywood,” the Indian film industry. Indian Jews were filmmakers and occasionally actors but, most of all, actresses. Navras Jaat Aafreedi writes:

[O]f all the diverse ethnic and religious groups in the world’s second-most-populous country, these earliest female stars came from a minority within India’s smallest religious minority, the Jews, who constitute no more than 0.0004 per cent of its total population. The Baghdadis (as the Jews who came from a number of Middle Eastern countries . . . came to be called), were one of the three Jewish communities in India; they were [also] among those [ethnic and religious] communities in India who completely Anglicized themselves. . . .

Baghdadi Jewish women, highly Westernized in their lifestyle and outlook, . . . did not have the reservations [about the] performing arts that women from other communities in India—including the other Jewish communities, the Bene Israel and the Cochin Jews—had. By doing so they paved the way for women from respectable families from other communities to follow suit. . . .

The first star of Indian cinema was Sulochana (née Ruby Myers, 1907-83). . . . A hugely popular dance of Sulochana’s from the film Madhuri was added to a short film on Mahatma Gandhi . . . which also happened to be India’s first “talkie.”

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.