While still a girl, and living in what is now Belarus, Celia Dropkin (1887-1956) wrote poetry in Russian. Only when she came to the U.S. in 1912 did she begin composing verse in Yiddish; she went on to become one of the most important American Yiddish poets of the 20th century. Shoshana Olidort has translated two poems, from a rare edition of Dropkin’s work, that are not available in the two standard collections. Herewith, the opening lines of “The Ballad of the Old Woman with the Basket and the Passengers on a Refugee Ship”:

Woven within the grayness of the sea
Absorbed within the lullaby of the sea
Absorbed within the white foam,
the silver foam
of the clouds’ white sheep—
—Sleep, sleep!

An old, old woman
with long-loose gray hair
rocks me, rocking with such feeling
her eyes watery, blurry,
her voice a monotonous murmur.
She rocks me in a large water-basket,
she rocks me with her old hands,
she rocks and carries me far into the undulating space.

Suddenly, she wakes me: Get up, get up!
I hear in her voice a melancholic cry,
and sirens answer, like an echo.
All at once, a ship appears
and people stand quietly at the edge of the ship
and people look silently into the depths.

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.