Born into Jewish Communist families, Richard Flacks and his wife Mickey both left the Kremlin-backed Communist Party of the USA in the late 1950s, following Nikita Khrushchev’s “secret speech” revealing Stalinist crimes, and became prominent figures in the emerging New Left. The couple eventually settled in Santa Barbara, California, where Richard joined the university’s sociology department and the couple committed themselves to building “socialism in one city.” In his review of their joint memoir, Making History, Making Blintzes, Harvey Klehr writes:

Both Mickey and Dick [as Richard calls himself in the memoir] joined Communist youth groups and attended Communist camps where the kids sang with Pete Seeger and idolized Paul Robeson. Growing up during the “Red Scare,” they felt alienated from an American society that was, as Mickey puts it, “capitalistic and corrupt, racist, anti-Semitic (or, if Jewish, self-hating), lowbrow, anti-intellectual, and generally and profoundly evil.” Dick’s parents lost their jobs after refusing to testify before committees investigating Communist influence among teachers (but both found employment in private schools). . . .

Yet their sensitivity about anti-Semitism is not particularly consistent:

Since Communism and social democracy have both failed, the couple calls for a new New Left based on the idea that “all social relations—both macro and micro—should enable everyone to participate in making the decisions that affect them.” The key, they say, is to capture the Democratic party and expel its corporate supporters and financiers. . . . Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, they believe, is evidence that socialists can transform America by focusing on concrete policies and avoiding inflammatory and divisive debates about ideology. They are also encouraged by the rise of Jeremy Corbyn’s new Labor party in England. Never mind that Corbyn is an anti-Semite.

That Communists and other enemies of democracy have insinuated themselves into organizations that once shunned them (the newest example is the emergence of a Communist caucus in the Democratic Socialists of America) is in part a consequence of the notion purveyed by Mickey and Dick Flacks that there are no enemies on the left.

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.