Born in 1937, Yaffa Eliach—who died last Wednesday—survived the Shoah with her family by hiding with Christian peasants. She then came to the U.S., where she became an influential historian and Holocaust educator. Joseph Berger writes:

Her mission, she said many times, was to document the victims’ lives, not just their deaths, to give them back their grace and humanity. She determined to do so as a member of President Jimmy Carter’s Commission on the Holocaust, . . . when she realized that the victims were [often] portrayed only as bulging-eyed skeletons in ragged striped uniforms, not as the vital people they once were.

Professor Eliach decided to recreate the shtetl she had known in Lithuania—Eisiskes, known in Yiddish as Eishyshok—where 3,500 Jews, almost the entire Jewish population, were killed, by collecting photographs of its inhabitants.

Starting with a nucleus of family photos she and her older brother had squirreled away in hiding, she spent fifteen years traveling to all 50 states and many countries searching for photographs, diaries, and letters of other shtetl residents. . . . Some 1,500 were selected for the Holocaust museum’s “Tower of Faces,” . . . where photographs are arranged in a narrow, soaring chasm that visitors walk through. The faces render the lives of so many ordinary Jews intimate and vibrant.

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.