Prior to World War I, traditional Jewish parents in Eastern Europe provided their daughters with, at the very most, a few years of formal religious education. If girls received any schooling beyond that, it would be at a secular institution; it was common, in fact, even for prominent Orthodox rabbis to send their daughters to secular schools. This all changed thanks to a Galician Jew named Sarah Schenirer, who founded a network of girls’ schools—known as Bais Yaakov—that grew rapidly in the 1920 and 30s; today, most ḥaredi girls attend Bais Yaakov institutions. Schenirer has since become a hero in ultra-Orthodox circles. But the popular version of her story, writes Leslie Ginsparg Klein, muddles some key details:

[According to most accounts], Schenirer first secured the approval of the major rabbinic figures of her time—most notably Israel Meir Kagan, known as the Ḥafetz Ḥayyim, a sort of living symbol of non-ḥasidic piety—before launching her grassroots educational movement in 1917. Some argue that she secured this approbation even before she began laying the foundations for her project in 1915. . . . [They claim] she obtained the approval of not only the Ḥafetz Ḥayyim, but also the Gerer rebbe [then the leading rabbi of Poland], and Rabbi Ḥayyim Ozer Grodzinski [the equivalent figure in northern Russia, among others]. . . .

However, there is something problematic about this account. . . . [T]he Ḥafetz Ḥayyim’s letter in support for Bais Yaakov . . . was written sixteen years after Schenirer opened the first Bais Yaakov school in Krakow. In fact, the declarations of support from the Grrer rebbe and Grodzinski were likewise issued a number of years after she had established [her flagship school in her native city of] Krakow. The only exception was the Belzer rebbe, who gave Schenirer a verbal blessing for her future labors. . . .

Schenirer seems to have gone to the Belzer rebbe, Yissachar Dov Rokeach, because she came from a family of his followers; at the time Rokeach was among Galicia’s most prominent ḥasidic rabbis, and also among the most conservative. Yet his approval consisted only of the words “blessing and success,” conveyed via Schenirer’s brother. Klein explains, therefore, that it was not the sanction of rabbinic leaders that paved the way for Schenirer’s educational innovations, but rather her school’s success that won her their support.

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.