In the period between the two world wars, a number of Jewish avant-garde artists—most notably Marc Chagall—designed sets for the still-thriving Yiddish theater in Europe. Alyssa Quint describes the work of some of the most prominent. (For pictures, follow the link below.)

Before creating sets for the Yiddish theater, Zygmunt Balk (1873-1941) worked at the Lwów (now Lviv) Opera House, created set designs for productions of Richard Wagner (among others), and ranked among Poland’s most important 20th-century painters. [The artist] Yosef Shlivniak (born in 1899) collaborated with the actor Zygmunt Turkow on his Yiddish-language staging of Stefan Zweig’s adaptation of Ben Jonson’s Volpone. [Another], Dina Matus, a member of the artistic-literary group Young Yiddish, conceived the Jewish folk motifs and ambience of the pioneering avant-garde director Michał Weichert’s play Trupe Tanentsap (“The Tanentsap Troupe”). . . .

Born in 1891 in Lyuvitsh (Łowicz), Poland, to ḥasidic parents, Władysław Zew (a/k/a Chaim Volf) Wajntraub was drawn to sketching and painting from a young age. Polish artists and art critics recognized Wajntraub’s raw talent, and Poland’s Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts supported his studies in France. In Paris, he met the Russian artist and set designer Leon Bakst (1866-1924) whose influence is responsible for Wajntraub’s decisive commitment to the decorative arts and theater design.

In his book, The Murdered Jewish Artists of Poland, Joseph Sandel writes of Wajntraub:“He was a fantasist, an expressionist with mystic overtones.” Wajntraub worked closely with the modernist poet Moyshe Broderzon (1890-1956) and designed the set for his legendary opera Dovid un Basheva and I.L. Peretz’s Baynakht oyfn altn mark (“Nighttime in the Old Marketplace”). Wajntraub also worked with Weichert who directed a production of Shabse Tsvi (“Sabbatai Tsvi”) in Riga, where newspapers gave equal column space to both director and set designer.

Except for Matus, every one of these artists died during World War II.

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.