Originally written in Italian in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown, Stefano Massini’s single-volume verse novel The Lehman Trilogy has recently appeared in English. Later adopted for the stage, it won much praise when it appeared at London’s National Theater in 2018. Both book and play tell, with a heavy dose of poetic license, the story of the Lehman brothers—founders and namesakes of the once-great investment bank was named—and their descendants. In Massini’s hands, their remarkable rags-to-riches story becomes what Adam Kirsch calls a “didactic pageant about capitalism, America, modernity—and Jewishness, which plays an unsavory role in the proceedings.” Kirsch writes:

The Lehman Trilogy draws [an] equation between Judaism and capitalism, repeatedly using the imagery and vocabulary of one to describe the other. This tendency was toned down somewhat in Sam Mendes’s version of the play at the National Theatre, but in the novel, it is unavoidable. . . . The New York Stock Exchange is “a synagogue/ with ceilings higher than a synagogue.” Lehman Brothers’ publicity strategy is “the bank’s new Talmud.” Business successes are greeted with cries of “Barukh HaShem,” and at the end of the book, the ghosts of Lehmans past gather to recite kaddish for their dead bank. “This is the famous Wall-Street tribe/ bloodthirsty, cruel people/ known for their human sacrifices,” says a figure in a dream-scene parody of King Kong, with Bobbie Lehman playing the role of the ape.

Massini seems to intend such conflations of Judaism and capitalism as a critique of the latter rather than the former. In The Lehman Trilogy, Jewish practice is one of the humane things that melts into air under capitalism; for instance, full-fledged mourning in the family’s early years shrinks to a perfunctory moment of silence in the later ones. Massini is a Catholic, but he prides himself on his Jewish knowledge, referring to mourning as “shiva and sh’loshim” and giving most chapters Hebrew or Yiddish titles. . . . But these signs of affection for Judaism strike a discordant note in a story that refurbishes the old tropes of left-wing anti-Semitism for a new audience.

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.