The protagonist of Children of the Ghetto, an immensely popular novel by the fin-de-siècle Anglo-Jewish writer Israel Zangwill, is Esther Ansell, a poor Jewish girl from an immigrant neighborhood who grows up to write an acclaimed novel of her own. An unsentimental depiction of the Jewish nouveaux riches, Ansell’s fictional novel is lambasted by her fellow Jews, who see it as lending credence to anti-Semitic stereotypes. While Zangwill would attract similar criticism for Children of the Ghetto, the inspiration for Ansell was an English author and poetess by the name of Amy Levy (1862-1889). Emma Garman writes:

During her short career, [Levy] published three volumes of poetry and three novels, and contributed journalism and short stories to periodicals including the Gentleman’s Magazine and Oscar Wilde’s Women’s World. Once hailed as a genius by Wilde, today Levy is little-known outside academic and poetic circles. . . .

In 1886, the British newspaper the Jewish Chronicle had published Levy’s essay “The Jew in Fiction,” wherein the twenty-four-year-old argued that no novelist had made a serious attempt “at grappling in its entirety with the complex problems of Jewish life and Jewish character. The Jew, as we know him today . . . has been found worthy of none but the most superficial observation.” Guilty of superficial portrayals, she charged, were Sir Walter Scott, [Charles] Dickens, and [William Makepeace] Thackeray. As for George Eliot, though Daniel Deronda was celebrated as the first Zionist novel in English literature, Levy dismissed its Jewish characters as unrealistic and overly noble. . . .

[Zangwill’s] Esther Ansell pays tribute to [Levy’s novel] Reuben Sachs, [which] focuses on an extended Jewish family who, living in bourgeois London splendor, overvalue success and prosperity while neglecting their spiritual and intellectual heritage. As such, they are a deliberate counterpoint to Eliot’s virtuous and idealized Jews. . . .

Reuben Sachs caused a dreadful scandal, with Levy accused in various quarters of vitriol and hatred of her own community. “She apparently delights in the task of persuading the general public,” wrote the reviewer for Jewish World, “that her own kith and kin are the most hideous types of vulgarity.”

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.