Born in Vienna in 1893 to Yiddish-speaking parents who immigrated to Manhattan’s Lower East Side when he was a child, the American Jewish poet Samuel Greenberg died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-three. Greenberg’s poems were first published in 1939, in a posthumous volume reissued this year. But before that Greenberg’s work had already garnered some fame thanks to the Ohio-born American poet Hart Crane, who discovered his manuscripts and liberally plagiarized from them. Neil Arditi tells the story:

Six years after Greenberg’s death, Crane was shown Greenberg’s handwritten poems by a neighbor in Woodstock, [New York], William Fisher, a former curator for the Metropolitan Museum of Art where Greenberg sometimes went to sketch. Fisher had taken an interest in the young poet, giving him books of Emerson, Shelley, Keats, and Browning, and, after his death, taking possession of some of his notebooks for safekeeping and possible publication.

Crane spent several nights excitedly reciting Greenberg’s poems with Fisher and typing up copies of his favorites for personal use. In a letter written at the time, he described Greenberg’s poems as “hobbling but really gorgeous attempts . . . made without any education. . . . No grammar, nor spelling, and scarcely any form, but a quality that is unspeakably eerie and the most convincing gusto.” Greenberg was a “Rimbaud in embryo.” Cutting and pasting from a handful of Greenberg originals, Crane assembled a polished mosaic—“Emblems of Conduct”—and published it under his own name in his first book of poems, White Buildings (1926).

Crane’s first biographer, Philip Horton . . . concluded that Greenberg was a “visionary,” a “Gottbetrunkener Mensch,” no doubt alluding to the German philosopher Novalis’s characterization of Spinoza. As a descriptive term, “God-intoxicated” has limited explanatory power, but Horton was correct to suggest that Greenberg is in some sense a religious poet. It might be less misleading to say that poetry is his religion.

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.