In the late 1960s, the economic historian Nathaniel Leff began publishing articles explaining why, since the 19th century, Brazil had exhibited slow economic growth and wide discrepancies between rich and poor. His explanations upended what was then, and largely remains, the widely held consensus of Brazilian economists. A devout Orthodox Jew who spent most of his career as a professor at Columbia University, Leff abruptly disappeared from view in the 1990s. Rafael Cariello explains the significance of Leff’s work, recounts his biography, and describes his own personal quest to discover the economist’s fate:

In his scholarly writings, Leff argues that the key to understanding why Brazil became a relatively poor country, with per-capita income far below the levels reached by Europe and the United States, was to be found in the 19th century—no earlier, no later. [By contrast], traditional historiography, which had produced the (still-dominant) narrative about the reasons for the country’s “backwardness,” tended to identify the colonial period [which ended in 1822] and the relationships between Portuguese America and the capitals of Europe as the source of the country’s sluggish pace toward industrialization and development. . . .

For Leff, the causes of Brazil’s underdevelopment also lay in the difficulty that the domestic market faced in articulating itself and growing more quickly, thus creating a complex economy. But instead of pointing the finger at commercial relationships with Europe, he blamed the Brazilian economy’s lack of internal integration—and the high cost of transportation in the country. . . .

As for Leff’s personal story, it tells much about the integration of Jews into American universities. Leff entered Harvard in the 1950s, when Ivy League schools were not entirely comfortable places for Jews. By the time he retired from Columbia, much had changed, as Cariello writes:

[One former colleague recalled Leff] coming to the campus and walking through the gardens and neoclassical buildings at Columbia in a dark hat and coat, with a full white beard. . . . [But in] the small photograph on the diplomatic document authorizing his entry into [Brazil, where he went to conduct research in 1963], Leff shows none of the features commonly associated with religious Jews. Not a hint of a beard, and no kippah. I put this to [his son] Avraham.

“Yes, it makes sense,” he said. “A while ago I was looking at my father’s reunion picture and a picture of him at Harvard. Had I not been told that was my father, I wouldn’t have known. He was totally clean-shaven, no hat, no nothing. This was America in the 1950s, where you didn’t rock the boat if you didn’t have to.” According to his son, Leff let his beard grow out only after he got tenure.

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.