In The People and the Book: 18 Classics of Jewish Literature, Adam Kirsch presents a kind of introductory course on Jewish thought, ranging from Pirkei Avot to Moses Maimonides to Benedict Spinoza to Theodor Herzl. Allan Arkush, who writes that the book “constitutes a deeply serious meditation on the meaning of Jewish existence,” takes up its author’s unusual analysis of Jerusalem, a defense of Judaism written by the 18th-century German Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn:

Mendelssohn had to explain how he could denounce religious coercion while at the same time maintaining his adherence to a religion that, in Kirsch’s words, “was based on the idea of compulsion through law.”

Unlike a very large number of Mendelssohn scholars, Kirsch sees that the bulk of Jerusalem leaves this problem unaddressed and that it is only at the end of the book that Mendelssohn answers . . . by explaining that the demise of the Jewish polity has transformed Jewish law, as Kirsch puts it, “from a communal rule for all Jews into a voluntary commitment of each Jew.” Kirsch then raises doubts about this contention, not in terms of its philosophical or theological adequacy, but with regard to its practical ramifications:

Once the decision to obey Jewish law is left up to every individual, it is inevitable that some—maybe most—Jews will decide that the burden is too great, that there is no way and no need to go on living under two sets of laws. And, in fact, that is just what happened with Mendelssohn’s own family. All of his grandchildren were baptized Christians, including the composer Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, who created masterpieces of church music.

Kirsch is not recalling this family history in order to disparage Mendelssohn’s ideology, as have so many other writers over the past two centuries. He is not even calling into question Mendelssohn’s affirmation of voluntarism. He is just pointing out that there are trade-offs, even for good things like liberty.

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.