The poems in Yehoshua November’s recently published Two Worlds Exist very much reflect the everyday—but not necessarily mundane—realities of the author’s life, which revolve around upholding his commitments to career, family, and God as a ḥasidic Jew. Reviewing the book, Sarah Rindner compares it with the author’s first published effort, God’s Optimism.

In November’s first collection, one sensed the earnest journey of a young religious poet as he experimented with different ways in which Jewish themes could be brought to poetic life without pushing theological boundaries. One poem was titled “How a Place Becomes Holy,” another, non-ironically, “The Purpose of This World.” In these short, sweet, and fundamentally optimistic poems, November expressed the faith of a ba’al t’shuvah [a newcomer to religious observance] who has discovered a new world. . . .

From a literary standpoint, [some of his observations were] a bit pat. [But] November was giving voice to an aspect of human experience that modern poetry, the precious lyrics produced in MFA workshops, had largely if not entirely forgotten. I borrowed the copy of God’s Optimism that I read from a man who kept it in his tallis bag.

November’s new collection is not disillusioned, but there is an ache and a weariness that wasn’t present in his earlier book. November seems to have made some discoveries about what it means to be a ḥasidic family man in suburban New Jersey, which, while perhaps no more onerous than any other kind of existence, involves its own unique challenges. Faith is not an end-point in this collection—he isn’t defending the wisdom of Judaism in a way that might be credible in a graduate poetry seminar. In Two Worlds Exist, Judaism is [instead] the ground on which November grapples with the seriousness of life. As he writes at the end of the title poem of the collection. . . . Judaism may not solve life’s problems, but it may, perhaps like poetry itself, heighten one’s sensitivity to them.

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.