Born in the shtetl of Koydanov, in what is now Belarus, Sarah Reisen (1885–1975) was a member of one of the most outstanding families in modern Yiddish literature: her brother Avraham was a folklorist and prolific author of short stories, while her other brother, Zalman, was a cultural historian and theorist of Jewish nationalism. Sarah spent her life engaged in a number of literary endeavors, among them translating the Russian classics into Yiddish, but she is best known for her poetry. Herewith, one of three of her lyric poems, newly translated by Eli Jany:

I swallowed down every
last drop of the pain—
and proceeded boldly
on to life again.

And the paths spread outward
hither and thither—
I walk without asking
and seek no “whither.”

And if, God forbid it,
my time should draw near—
and from all of the paths
I must disappear,

then in the air I’ll leave
notes of my refrain,
ever-resounding links
of the golden chain.

That last phrase, for Reisen and her readers, invokes both the centuries-old Jewish tradition and the modern Yiddish literary tradition of which she was a part.

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.