Celia Dropkin (1887-1955) was one of a number of women, mostly living in New York City, who began writing Yiddish poems for publication in the 1920s, when Yiddish literary circles were still very much male-dominated. Analyzing a poem in which the speaker describes being humiliated and morally crushed by the accusations of an unnamed tormentor, Ruth Wisse writes:

The woman in the poem does not say what, if anything, she has done to earn her accuser’s mistrust. Although she is the poem’s subject, its tone is determined by the person who has turned her into its object. . . . The phrase that kept reverberating in my head was the one . . . that serves as the poem’s title, in koyt fun dayn fardakht. You soak me . . . not simply in dirt, which would have been shmutz, but in koyt, in the filth, of your fardakht, the Germanic term for suspicion or distrust. The grating and guttural sounds of those two nouns . . . have the power to turn the woman into an odious, hideous creature. . . .

As I say, the poem got under my skin but I could not say why. None of my complicated experiences in love or antagonism had ever made me feel ossified, as the woman is here. . . .

One day during a trip to Israel in 1994 a Hamas suicide bomber detonated a bus in Tel Aviv killing 22 people and wounding 50 others. A paper I was reading published a copy of the Hamas covenant and I read through the preamble’s determination to obliterate Israel. . . Unbidden, the words leapt to mind: “Vos ikh zog un, / alts toyvlstu in koyt fun dayn fardakht” (Everything I say and do / you soak in the filth of your suspicion.)

I rehearsed the poem again and yes, there was just what I was feeling. Your pathology turns me into an ugly and malicious creature, glued to the floor, immobile, unable to exact revenge. It was suddenly clear to me why the woman in the poem could not act on her fury. It wasn’t because she was a masochist and enjoyed rebuff. She cannot strike back because she wants to be accepted by the very person who will not grant her love.

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.