According to numerous jokes, family legends, and even the movie The Godfather, Part II, officials at Ellis Island frequently Anglicized immigrants’ exotic or difficult-to-pronounce names, sometimes deliberately, sometimes inadvertently. These stories loom particularly large in American Jewish cultural memory. But Kirsten Fermaglich cites ample evidence that this was not the case; rather, newcomers to U.S. usually took the initiative, changing their names voluntarily after their arrival:

[At Ellis Island], immigration procedures did not typically include the question “What is your name?” Bureaucrats simply checked immigrants’ names to make sure they matched the names already listed on ships’ passenger lists. . . . Between 1892 and 1920, when thousands of immigrants passed through the immigration station on Ellis Island each day, there were no descriptions of Ellis Island name-changing in popular magazines or books. And even after immigration slowed significantly in the 1920s, popular books and magazines for the next four decades did not typically describe Ellis Island officials as changing immigrant names. . . .

It was not until the 1970s that the image of Ellis Island name-changing took hold of the American imagination. One popular 1979 book about Ellis Island and the immigrant experience, for example, described officials who were “casual and uncaring on the matter of names.” . . .

Portraits of involuntary name-changing at Ellis Island fit both with the island’s new prominence [beginning in the late 1960s] as a symbol of immigration, and with growing distrust of government authority. . . . Ellis Island name-changing also fits another emerging theme in American culture in the 1970s: [the] quest for authenticity. . . . From the 1970s through the 1990s, novels, films and plays that portrayed Jewish life, such as Wendy Wasserstein’s play Isn’t It Romantic? and Barry Levinson’s movie, Avalon, represented name changers as phonies or sellouts.

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.