To the extent that Jewish theologians are engaged with contemporary academic philosophy, they tend to favor the “Continental” approach rooted in the French and German philosophical traditions. Samuel Lebens calls on Jewish thinkers instead to apply the methods of “analytical” philosophers—those thinkers, mostly English-speaking, whose work is based on formal logic, precise language, and basic concepts. He admits this sounds counterintuitive:

One might think that to engage in a systematic program of outlining what it is that Judaism believes is to misunderstand what Judaism is about. Unlike Christianity, Judaism shirks systematization. What binds Jews together, apart from various ethnic, cultural, and national ties, has always had much more to do with what we do than what we believe. We don’t have a history of councils gathering together to decide on an issue of theology or metaphysics, as the Christians have. If we had any councils gathering together, they were more likely to decide upon a matter of law than upon a matter of belief. . . .

Nonetheless, the danger of systematizing an unsystematic religion can be overcome in [several] ways.

One route would have the analytic philosopher of Judaism develop a conception of a faith that eschews doctrine—[that is,] give an analytic account of why religion is not the sort of thing that propositional doctrines can aptly govern. An analytical philosophy that describes, in a principled and well-argued fashion, when and where the strictures of analytic philosophy are best left behind is still an attempt at analytic philosophy!

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.