Reviewing a series of translations of the works of the great Hebrew novelist S.Y. Agnon, Robert Alter comments on the master’s characteristic approach toward language and religion:

[Agnon’s friend, the pioneering scholar of Jewish mysticism Gershom] Scholem, in an interview on Israeli television a few years after Agnon’s death, was asked by the critic Dan Miron what he made of Agnon’s Orthodoxy. Scholem shrewdly responded that for Agnon, art was the crucial consideration, and that he was religious because it served his purposes as an artist.

His religious identity is clearly inseparable from the unique path he chose as a Hebrew stylist, and that in turn poses a constant challenge for translating his work. “My language,” he writes, “is a simple language, the language of all the generations that preceded and of all the generations to come.” His Hebrew is essentially the Hebrew of the early rabbis, which means the Hebrew of the Mishnah and the Midrash compiled early in the Common Era, with at some moments a trace of Yiddish inflections and occasional limited concessions to the modern language. His hyperbolic invocation of “the language of all the generations” reflects his classicizing bent: for him, rabbinic Hebrew is as living and subtly expressive a vehicle as it was 1,800 years ago, and by using it he means his works to be similarly long-lasting. . . .

Agnon’s Hebrew, of course, is wonderfully apt for all the stories and novellas that use the device of a traditional teller of tales—who often proves to be ironic or subversive beneath the mask of tradition. In the novels and stories that deal with people in modern settings, the prose often has the effect of generating pervasive ironies because of the cultivated discrepancy between the late-antique coloration of the Hebrew and the world of the characters, often characterized by secular values, the ambiguities of sexual freedom, and the ravages of modern war. . . .

[There is, then, an] underlying paradox in Agnon’s multifaceted project as a writer. He often presented himself to his readers and to the public eye as a modern avatar of Jewish tradition, writing in the very Hebrew in which it had been fashioned, expressing reverence for its sages and saints. But he also had a sense that there was a kinship between the artist and the outlaw.

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.