Until last year, the American poet James Reiss was unable to read the mature work of his brother, the late Israeli poet Reuven Ben-Yosef (né Robert Eliot Reiss), who made the Jewish state his home in 1959. Thanks to a recently published volume of English translations by Michael Weingrad, he has familiarized himself with both the poetry and the poet:

Now that I can finally read his poems, I see how, even though we weren’t personally close, our work developed in parallel—or what Saul Bellow called axial—lines over the decades. [Ben-Yosef’s] long poem about New York, “The City,” complements my own Big Apple poems; his portrait of the poet as an “aging lion” echoes my portrait of the king of beasts in “Three Leos”; his description of our father’s funeral service aboard a rented boat pairs well with my elegy for our dad in my first book; his frequent preference for stanzas with the same number of lines equals my own; his experiments with visual poems match “concrete” verse I continue to tweak; his love of imagery and sound shows (at least in translation) in seven stark words I wish I had written: “A shack in a stand of pines.”

Unlike such colloquial late-20th-century Israeli poetry as Yehuda Amichai’s, and unlike much of my own work, which has been called “plainspoken,” Ben-Yosef’s verse apparently deploys biblical and demotic Hebrew in dense, allusive ways. . . .

Fifteen years after he died, a major reassessment of Ben-Yosef’s work may win him readers—an audience—on this shore. As far as I’m concerned, the book is a triumph for our family.

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.