In medieval Germany and northwestern France—an area then known as Ashkenaz—a number of Jewish women began putting on t’fillin, wearing garments with ritual fringes (tsitsit), and performing other religious rituals generally reserved for men. What’s more, they did so with rabbinic approval. This phenomenon, the subject of a new book by Elisheva Baumgarten, was a female version of medieval Jewish pietism, which—for both men and women—often involved adopting practices not required by the letter of Jewish law. Julie Mell writes in her review:

[M]edieval women’s active assumption of “time-bound commandments,” commandments from which they were legally exempt, was not a form of proto-feminism. As Baumgarten never fails to remind her readers, medieval Ashkenaz was a staunchly hierarchical and patriarchal society. Neither the halakhic authorities nor the women about whom they wrote ever questioned the categorical divide between men and women, even when they permitted women’s observance of those commandments reserved for men.

In fact, the same pious impulse that led women to break the gender boundary also led women to impose upon themselves what today would be considered gender exclusion. Particularly pious Jewish women, for instance, began absenting themselves from the synagogue in the late 11th and 12th centuries when their menstrual cycle rendered them impure. By the late 13th and 14th centuries, this became the norm for all Ashkenazi women, [although ceasing to be so in later centuries]. . . .

Baumgarten blazes a trail in the field of medieval Jewish history and law [by arguing that texts] and halakhah do not shape life and practice, but rather it is the other way around. Social custom and contemporary cultural settings led medieval rabbis to discover new things in old texts.

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.