Today, Orthodox Jewry is divided, if not always cleanly, between the Modern Orthodox, who embrace secular education and some openness to the non-Jewish world, and the ultra-Orthodox, who pursue greater cultural isolation and a more stringent understanding of religious requirements. Moshe Koppel notes that these categories did not apply to the many Jews he knew in his youth who had come to the U.S. from Eastern Europe after World War II. He seeks to explain how the schism came about:

[A] generation of yeshiva-educated baby boomers growing up after the war moved comfortably along the spectrum running from frum [i.e., strictly observant] and segregated to modern and assimilating. On the one hand, they inherited deep feelings of alienation and resentment toward acculturated American Jews and their establishment. On the other hand, as is common with children of immigrants, they rushed headlong into professional achievement and American culture, often including the 1960s counterculture. The resulting tension played out in many interesting ways, including various singular combinations that are fast becoming extinct.

The success of Orthodox institutions in America, especially beginning in the 1960s and 70s, has had some unintended consequences. Large educational institutions are not artisanal studios; they are instruments of mass production. Even if graduates inevitably choose their own divergent paths, these institutions define a standard against which one must self-define. Furthermore, since such institutions compete for students, they inevitably cluster around certain standard forms. . . .

Eventually, such institutions are around long enough to produce their own teachers, creating a feedback loop that narrows and hardens institutional identity. Graduates of the various standard educational types then sort themselves out to different neighborhoods, like [Modern Orthodox] Teaneck and [ḥasidic] Borough Park, where they don’t need to interact and where there is intense pressure to conform to the right stereotype.

One consequence of this is that a certain type of crossover character is disappearing. There are no more celebrated Lithuanian talmudic sages who play chess and go the opera. There are no more wives of ḥasidic rebbes studying in Hunter College. . . . [This] division of a messy continuum into distinct segregated sub-communities is merely the preliminary phase of a process in which segregation leads to polarization.

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.