From the American founding into the 20th century, the Catskill mountains have represented an alternative to the rapid industrialization and urbanization of New York City and its environs. An engaging, if sometimes confused, new book recounts the history of the mountain range and its multiple transformations. Jay Weiser writes in his review:

By the 1910s, the railroads, eager to attract traffic, offered fares to suit the pocketbooks of members of the massive East European Jewish immigration. Unlike [Washington] Irving, [James Fenimore] Cooper, and the Hudson River painters, [who romanticized the region in their works], the Jewish immigrants lacked nostalgia for a past that their forebears were not part of. Nor, coming from industrial New York City and its giant garment industry, did they share the upscale 19th-century quest for the unspoiled sublime. And so the previously remote (and therefore less expensive) southern Catskills became the scenic-yet-raucous Borscht Belt, with a range of accommodations from humble bungalow colonies to the 1,200-room Concord Hotel, where ladies were expected to change their finery three times a day.

The Borscht Belt also served as a training ground for entertainers: Milton Berle, Buddy Hackett, and Joan Rivers strutted their stuff at the Concord’s Imperial Room. . . . The Borscht Belt resorts’ colorful family owners (and colorful gangsters) and their increasingly lavish facilities (often designed by the pop-modernist master architect Morris Lapidus, best known for his Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach) make for the most vivid episodes here.

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.