The late-19th-century German philosopher made his fair share of disparaging remarks about Jews and Judaism in his published and unpublished writings; far harsher, however, were his judgments about anti-Semites, Germans, and Christians. In a review of Nietzsche’s Jewish Problem, by Robert Holub, Brian Leiter defends the philosopher against the charge that anti-Semitism was integral to his thought:

Nietzsche’s target is obviously not the [Jewish or Christian] religion or the adherents [of either], but the values they embrace—the “ascetic” moralities . . . that denounce lust for sex, wealth, cruelty, and power, moralities characteristic of all the world’s major religions but unfamiliar in the ancient Greek and Roman world with which Nietzsche was deeply familiar. . . . Nietzsche, in fact, uses Judaism and Christianity interchangeably throughout the Genealogy of Morality: “everything is being made appreciably Jewish, Christian, or plebian (never mind the words!).”

He equates the “slave revolt” in morality—the overturning of the values of Greek and Roman antiquity with the values we now associate with “Judeo-Christian” morality—with the New Testament, with the Reformation, and with the triumph of the Catholic Pope in Rome. . . .

In his concluding chapter, Holub acknowledges that the real question is whether Nietzsche’s alleged Judeophobic comments are “concerned with issues of philosophical import” and thus should affect how we understand his philosophy. To answer this question, though, we need to be clearer . . . about what counts as objectionable Judeophobia. Surely it is wrongful to attack certain people based on negative stereotypes related to the religion they practice. . . . But is it similarly objectionable to be critical of a morality associated with Judaism (and Christianity, Islam etc.)? If so, then Nietzsche is not only a Judeophobe but a Christophobe, an Islamophobe, and so on. His entire corpus is an attack on values endorsed by the world’s major religions that he argues have pernicious psychological effects.

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.