In Leaving the Jewish Fold, the historian Todd Endelman traces the history of apostasy from Judaism—which he terms “radical assimilation”—from the Middle Ages to the present. Dominic Green writes in his review:

In our enlightened times, it is possible to identify as a person of no fixed principles. But for most of the past millennium, to cease being Jewish meant to start being Christian. Endelman identifies two forms of conversion from Judaism: “conversions of conviction” and “conversions of convenience.” The convicts are more spectacular, but the convenient are more numerous. For every sincere conversion on St. Paul’s road to Damascus, there have been thousands on the road to jobs in London and Paris, Berlin and Vienna, New York and Washington. [The poet Heinrich] Heine justified this kind of conversion as a “passport to civilization”: an escape from prejudice, an entry into high culture. Others simply resigned from a club that they never asked to join. Such converts did not need to be threatened with a sword, only with a carrot and stick: economic opportunity and “conversionary pressures.” . . .

There is nothing, [however,] “radical” about modern Western assimilation. The assimilators followed the universalist flow of their times and went out with a whimper, not a bang.

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.