Born in 1954, Elliot Jager grew up on New York’s Lower East Side after it had already ceased to be a thriving Jewish immigrant neighborhood. Jager, who now resides in Jerusalem, considers this corner of Manhattan in its present form, and reminisces about its past:

Growing up, my Lower East Side was overwhelmingly populated by Puerto Ricans. The remnant Jewish community of roughly 20,000—many elderly and poor—was preyed upon by neighborhood louts. Raised Orthodox, I worshipped in the Sassover rebbe’s shtibl, or storefront synagogue, on Eighth Street between Avenues D and C. It was within easy walking distance of our apartment in the Jacob Riis Houses project, though a bit risky for a boy wearing a yarmulke. . . .

Now, well past middle age and from 6,000 miles away, I find myself captivated by David Simon’s television tour de force The Wire, set in contemporary Baltimore. In many ways, it’s led me to rethink how I ought to look back at my own New York City upbringing. True, I was fatherless and poor in a tough neighborhood; but I was blessed with an innately capable mother who taught me values, virtue, and empathy. My community, though moribund and imperfect, was nonetheless committed to mutual aid. Ritual and tradition offered a framework for life.

So while I can’t identify with hipsters hankering after tenement museums, potato knishes, and kosher-style delicatessen, this curmudgeon is not shedding any tears that my Lower East Side has been supplanted by something—apparently—kinder, gentler and, I pray, more humane.

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.