Last week, the Metropolitan Museum of Art issued a press release about a new exhibit featuring works by the widely acclaimed German artist Gerhard Richter. Lee Rosenbaum comments on the wording:

“Horrific,” “profoundly disturbing,” “jolting,” . . . but surely not “poignant.”

That mild adjective was used by the Metropolitan Museum’s communications office in its. . . for the press release announcing the display (to January 18) of Gerhard Richter‘s four paintings from his “landmark Birkenau series” of 2014, in which black-and-white photographic images of inmates who had been killed by the Nazis in the Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chamber were colorfully overlaid and obliterated, using Richter’s signature “squeegee” technique.

“Poignant” is a word that I’ve never before seen (and hope never to see again) in connection with the Holocaust. These paintings soft-pedal and aestheticize photos that were taken of gas-chamber victims while their remains were being burned and disposed of. That stark visual evidence of what might otherwise have been disbelieved and denied was surreptitiously captured on camera by the Sonderkommandos—concentration camp prisoners who were forced to “burn the hundreds of thousands of people that were gassed—some of whom they recognized as family members, friends, or acquaintances,” in the words of . . . the Museum of Jewish Heritage.

I can only hope that the next time the Birkenau series surfaces, it won’t be at an auction house or an art dealer’s gallery.

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.