Reviewing David Schoenbaum’s new biography of the famed Jewish violinist Isaac Stern, Amy Spiro writes:

Stern, who died in 2001, was born in what is now Ukraine, and moved with his Jewish parents to San Francisco when he was a baby. At age eight he began studying the violin, at ten made his debut with the San Francisco Symphony, and by eighteen he was crisscrossing the United States on tour. At twenty-three he took the stage triumphantly at Carnegie Hall—an event he referred to as his “professional bar mitzvah” in the 1999 memoir he wrote with Chaim Potok.

While Stern quickly became one of the most in-demand violinists around the world, Schoenbaum focuses much of the book on his societal and philanthropic ventures, including his love for, and extensive ties to, the state of Israel, [where], he writes, “the self-assured informality of Israeli audiences in shorts and khaki shirts, score in hand, immediately enchanted him.”

He met with Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, developed a close friendship with the Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek, and repeatedly canceled concerts elsewhere to rush to Israel and entertain its war-weary citizens, in 1967, again in 1973—and at an infamous 1991 concert interrupted by an air-raid siren, and carried out with the audience wearing gas masks.

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.