Few people did more than Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner to introduce the raucous Jewish humor of the borscht belt to the American mainstream; although the resorts and hotels where they began their careers are long gone, the two—at ages ninety-three and ninety-seven, respectively—have not lost their comic verve. Hadley Freeman describes an interview with the pair, who have been fast friends since the days when they began performing their 2,000-Year-Old Man routine together:

The 2,000-Year-Old Man is the revered comedy sketch Reiner and Brooks [created] in the 1950s, in which Reiner—always playing the straight man—would interview Brooks, the titular old man, about his life. Despite coming from the same time and place as Jesus, the 2,000-Year-Old Man talked an awful lot like a Jewish guy from 1950s Brooklyn: “I have over 42,000 children and not one of them ever visits me!” was a typical kvetch from Brooks. When Reiner asked what the plague was like, Brooks improvised back, “Too many rats, not enough cats.”

Brooks and Reiner were both born in New York, second-generation Jewish immigrants. America was made by immigrants, but it was these children of immigrants who helped to define Jewish-American comedy, with its mix of joyful silliness and whaddaya-gonna-do shrugs.

“I think Jews were naturally funny because they were low on the totem pole, so they made fun of the people higher on the pole,” says Reiner.

They met working on Sid Caesar’s TV variety show, Your Show of Shows. Other writers who worked for Caesar included Neil Simon and, later, Woody Allen, both of whom also played no small part in the [shaping] of Jewish-American comedy.

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.