Last year, Hersh David Nomberg’s collection Warsaw Stories and Zalman Shneur’s novella A Death: Notes of a Suicide were both published in English, translated from the Yiddish by David Kennedy. Nomberg and Shneur were renowned writers in Jewish literary circles in their own day; the latter was even awarded the Israel Prize.

Reviewing the two translations, Ri J. Turner notes that these works, both written in the first decade of the 20th century, have as their protagonists exemplars of the archetypal figure from Yiddish literature known as the talush (from the Hebrew, “plucked” or “disconnected”)—“the displaced, alienated, emasculated intellectual who has attained a certain modern urban ‘freedom’ at the expense of belonging, connection, meaning, and ultimately sanity.” One such character is Bender, the hero of two of Nomberg’s stories:

In each of the stories, Bender is so paralyzed by his own ideas about romantic love that the flesh-and-blood existence of his supposed beloved pales into unreality. Any sort of decisive action, not to mention interaction, becomes impossible thanks to the combination of impatient desire and crippling self-doubt that governs him. In a move characteristic of most of Nomberg’s heroes (or, better, anti-heroes), Bender hovers on the verge of mailing a letter to his beloved—or, more accurately, two contradictory versions of a letter, unable as he is to commit to one single approach—but ultimately “held himself back, . . . let go of the post-box flap, tore the letters to shreds, and let the wind blow the pieces in every direction. ‘I don’t need it. I don’t need anything. I don’t need anybody,’ he mumbled to himself.’”

[But] what hope [do] these two works of prewar Yiddish literature have of fitting into the world of contemporary English letters, with its overwhelmingly different narrative demands and conventions? One answer, I think, . . . is that despite our vast temporal and spatial distance from Nomberg’s and Shneur’s world, the central issue at the heart of both books is more current today than ever before: the mechanisms by which ascetic, self-destructive narratives of victimhood can quickly spiral out of control within individual and communal echo chambers.

This occurs especially in the absence of restraining and stabilizing influences, particularly social structures built of nuanced, intimate, long-term connections that can repeatedly and sustainably pull overthinkers back from the ledge.

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.