Although the Third Reich famously suppressed what it labeled “degenerate art,” it gave a fair amount of leeway to actors, architects, artists, musicians, and filmmakers—provided they had no Jewish ancestry, weren’t socialists, and were willing to keep any questionable political opinions to themselves. In a new book, Jonathan Petropoulos explores the careers of such artists and the moral compromises they made.  Mark Falcoff writes in his review:

The Nazis welcomed the accommodations [of these artists] because they had settled on no hard-and-fast aesthetic of their own. From the late 1920s, the Nazi-party ideologist Alfred Rosenberg attempted to separate “good” and “bad” art through his Fighting League for German Culture, calling for a kind of “blood and soil” folklorism in the plastic arts and literature. But his efforts came largely to naught, partly because while the Nazis knew what they didn’t like, they weren’t so certain about what they did. Even Expressionism, the quintessential art form of the Weimar Republic, was not ruled out of bounds during the National Socialist period. . . .

[Joseph] Goebbels’s control of German culture operated through a series of “chambers” (literature, film, music, etc.) and also through preexisting “academies,” which he immediately purged of Jews and leftists. But a surprising number of creative people looked past this detail and were happy to work with a regime that, unlike its predecessor, was generous with funding for the arts. The poet Gottfried Benn, a modernist, served for a time as head of the Prussian Academy. Moreover, as Petropoulos writes, “among non-Jewish writers a relatively large number with stronger-than-average talent were accepted by the regime.”

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.