Born in Europe in 1824 as Henrietta Pulfermacher, Cora Wilburn came to the U.S. in 1848 and established herself as a successful writer, although she has long since been forgotten. Without ever shedding her Jewish identity, she became involved in the Spiritualist movement, whose adherents sought to make contact with the souls of the dead. Recounting his search to find Wilburn’s writing and reconstruct her biography, Jonathan Sarna describes her sole novel, the semiautobiographical Cosella Wayne:

The novel immediately captured my attention as its central characters were Jews. It soon dawned on me that nothing resembling this novel appears in the (meager) canon of 19th-century American Jewish fiction. Indeed, Cosella Wayne anticipates central themes of American Jewish writing: intermarriage, generational tension, family dysfunction, Jewish-Christian relations, immigration, poverty, the place of women in Jewish life, the rise of romantic love, and the tension between destiny and free will. The book provides rich descriptions of Jewish rituals as well as Jewish communities around the world, and it introduces readers to Jewish texts little available at that time in English, such as the Ethics of the Fathers.

The story casts light on the early decades of Spiritualism—today appreciated for its openness toward women and advocacy of liberal political causes, such as abolitionism and women’s rights. Finally, Cosella Wayne dates back farther than any previously known Jewish novel published in the United States with American themes.

Standard accounts consider Nathan Mayer’s Civil War novel, Differences, published in 1867, to be “the first novel of literary value to treat of American Jews seriously, realistically, and at length.” Cosella Wayne, set in the 1840s and published in 1860, predates Differences by seven years. The first American Jewish novel authored by a woman, according to most accounts, is Emma Wolfe’s novel of intermarriage, Other Things Being Equal, published in 1892. Again, Cosella Wayne revises this chronology and demonstrates that the very first American Jewish novelsit of consequence was another woman, Cora Wilburn.

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.