In the past decade, comic-book characters, and especially those created by Marvel, have come to dominate the movie business. “The person who has had the most impact on superhero comics” is Marvel’s Stan Lee, writes Michael Weingrad in his review of a recent biography of Lee by Liel Leibovitz. Born Stanley Lieber, the creator of Spiderman, Iron Man, and others, was the offspring of Jewish immigrants—and in this, he was not alone:

Even in comparison with so many other contributions to American popular culture and entertainment, comic books are an especially Jewish story. In addition to Superman’s creators [Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster], Bob Kane (born Kahn) created Batman, and Jack Kirby (Jacob Kurtzberg) and Joe (Hymie) Simon invented Captain America. The comic-book format itself was pioneered by the promotional publisher Maxwell Gaines (Ginzberg). Kane and Lee attended the same high school as the great comic-book artist and early graphic novelist Will Eisner.

Even René Goscinny, the cocreator of France’s most successful comic-book hero, Astérix, spent the late 1940s sharing a tiny New York City artist studio with MAD magazine’s creator and fellow Jew Harvey Kurtzman. All this reflected an immense midcentury unleashing of Jewish American creativity—as well as the refusal of many advertising firms to hire Jews.

As Leibovitz explains, for all Lee’s corniness as a prose stylist, his heroes were self-reflective, morally complex city dwellers. Often unhappy, their powers caused as many problems as they solved. This sensibility reflected the ebullient pressure cooker of mid-20th-century anxieties and hopes that were simultaneously American, Jewish, and personal. Leibovitz further suggests, but does not quite fully explain, that Marvel’s morally engaged yet unredemptive vision was a vital Jewish end-run around the longstanding Protestant cultural stalemate between fundamentalist and progressive visions of salvation. I am more inclined to think of a favorite Yiddish saying of my grandmother that could stand as the motto of Marvel in contrast to DC: es geyt nit in di kleyder (it doesn’t go in the clothes). In other words, it’s not about the costume.

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.