While Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel of Prague (d. 1609), known by the Hebrew acronym Maharal, is most famous today because of the legend that he used kabbalistic magic to create a golem that could defend the Jews of his city from anti-Semites, his real legacy consists of his towering achievements as a talmudist, philosopher, mystic, and leader of one of the world’s largest Jewish communities. The golem legend stems from a popular Hebrew work, published in Poland in 1909, that record various stories about the Maharal’s wondrous doings. Zack Rothbart recounts one of these—concerning the rabbi’s wife, Perl.

Reb Shmelke Reich was a wealthy and respected figure who arranged for a marriage between his daughter Perl and Judah Loew, a promising fifteen-year-old Torah scholar. Young Judah headed off to yeshiva to study and in the meantime, Reb Shmelke’s fortunes reversed and he became very poor, unable to pay a dowry for his daughter to wed.

Three years after the marriage was arranged, Reb Shmelke wrote to his son-in-law to be, letting him know that seeing as he could not afford a respectable dowry, the young man was freed of his commitment and didn’t have to marry Perl after all. The young man wouldn’t hear of it, writing back that he would wait for assistance from on high.

The righteous young Perl decided to help her parents out by opening a small bakery and selling bread to support her family. She worked in the bakery for ten years, while her betrothed continued studying Torah, waiting for the day he could marry his beloved. . . .

The story, of course, concludes with a fairy-tale ending.

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.