By the 1930s, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Turkey’s first president, was deeply involved in his project of modernizing and Westernizing his country, a project that included reforming the universities. When he found out that Jews were leaving Germany to escape Nazi persecution, he began recruiting German Jewish professors. Their fate is the subject of a new German-language film, Haymatloz, whose title is a play on the Yiddish word meaning “homeless.” Heike Mund writes:

The film highlights a chapter of German-Turkish history that has largely been forgotten, telling the stories of five German emigrants who worked as professors at Turkish academies, universities, ministries, and in public office. In Turkey, they weren’t labeled as Jews, but rather regarded as Germans. They taught generations of Turkish students. . . . Istanbul University [alone] hired 30 Jewish professors in the 1933-34 winter semester.

[In the film], Jewish emigrants’ children reminisce about their childhoods, about growing up in Istanbul or in Ankara, and about what awaited them in postwar Germany, where the Jewish returnees were anything but welcome and where no one spoke about the fate of the German Jews.

Haymatloz is a beautiful film, directed with a great sense of timing and power of images, and with a strong political focus toward the end. The film’s protagonists are concerned about a country where, step by step, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is undoing Atatürk’s achievements and Turkey’s social progress.

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.