When the U.S. entered World War I, the War Department gave the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA)—at the time a distinctly Protestant organization with an evangelizing mission—an official role in coordinating cultural and religious activities for men in uniform. The result, writes Allan Arkush, was that “Protestant Christianity was to be the de-facto religion of the American servicemen.” To counteract this trend, a group of prominent Jewish figures organized the Jewish Welfare Board (JWB), whose activities are the subject of a new book titled Making Judaism Safe for America. Arkush writes in his review:

The JWB . . . could provide the kind of activities that the YMCA provided: lectures, movies, and dances (with the right sort of women). And it could reinforce the patriotic message by stressing “that through engaged adherence to the tenets of Judaism, Jews could become better citizens and better Americans.” One of the most important actions it took to foster such adherence was to lobby successfully for the appointment (for the first time since the Civil War) of Jewish military chaplains to serve in the U.S. Army.

Once the necessary legislation had been passed, the JWB assumed responsibility for selecting the men who would fill the limited number of positions that had been created. The board made reasonable efforts to select a denominationally diverse crew of rabbis, but the criteria imposed by the government and endorsed by the board itself effectively ruled out anyone who lacked a good secular education, and thereby excluded practically all of the available Orthodox rabbis. The vast majority of the 25 candidates who were eventually approved were graduates of the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College.

Since a couple of dozen chaplains obviously couldn’t handle the job of providing religious services for tens of thousands of soldiers, the board hired an additional 30 or so “camp rabbis”—usually rabbis from communities near military bases—as well as hundreds of more- or less-qualified field workers, who became known as “Star of David men.”

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.