Criticizing contemporary humanities professors for having “snuffed out the divine” in their disciplines, William Kolbrener argues that in so doing they have denied literature’s ability to let the reader transcend his own experiences, instead falling back on the narrowmindedness of identity politics.

In a time when the most educated have dispensed with traditional knowledge as a form of wisdom, the humanities have [rejected the] notion that works of the past can help edify our sense of who we are today, and more than that, help us move forward into an uncertain future. [But] we do not have to give up our identities—or commitments—when encountering minds, cultures, and worlds different from our own.

[For today’s politically correct critic], it’s understood that it if you’re a gay man, or a black woman, or even a Jew, it’s difficult to approach a work—let’s say John Milton’s Paradise Lost—that presupposes a white male Protestant reader. With that said, I am a Jew, and a Miltonist. . . . I can look with awe at his representations of God, faith, and the human psyche. I may exercise my skepticism when reading and interpreting him—and Milton is above all a skeptical believer—but it does not stop me . . . from being inspired, not only by Milton’s God, but by Milton’s Adam and Eve, his man and woman.

Finding the infinite in literature—in Homer, Shakespeare, or even the self-proclaimed atheist Virginia Woolf—[can lead to] a better understanding, in our world of suffering, of the possibilities for freedom and human transcendence.

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.