Thanks to a sizable grant, the Jewish History Association of South Wales has begun a project to record oral histories and digitize photographs documenting Jewish life in South Wales. The BBC reports:

A century ago, 6,000 Jewish people lived in Wales; today best estimates put the population in the hundreds. Migration was driven by the industrial revolution in Wales, combined with persecution in Russia and Eastern Europe. By the late 19th century there were thriving Jewish communities in Swansea, Merthyr Tydfil, Brynmawr, Aberdare, and Pontypridd.

In the 1940s, so many Jewish workers had come to the area to support the war effort that the predominant languages heard on Treforest Industrial Estate [in the borough of] Rhondda Cynon Taff were Polish, German, and Czech. Yet by 1999 Merthyr’s once 400-strong community had disappeared altogether when George Black, “the Last Jew in Merthyr,” died at the age of eighty-two.

The History Association’s first task is to research the stories of people named on the Cardiff Reform Synagogue’s memorial tablet, . . . erected in memory of relatives of synagogue members who died in the Holocaust, and whose graves are unknown.

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.