In 2018, the National Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah opened in the city of Ferrara, whose Jewish history is known to Americans primarily because of the 1971 film The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, based on Giorgio Bassani’s novel of the same name. Created pursuant to an act of the Italian parliament, the museum was the result of a nearly eighteen-year discussion of where and how to create a memorial to the Holocaust. The result is as much about the history of Ferrara’s Jews as about their fate under fascism. Carlin Romano writes:

[T]he House of Este . . . ruled Ferrara from 1240 to 1598. Ercole d’Este (1431–1505) welcomed Sephardi Jews expelled from Iberia and left the city a remarkable array of palaces, gardens, and grand avenues, as well as medieval walls and a Jewish quarter, which became the ghetto in 1624 after the Vatican seized power from the House of Este.

One reason Ferrara got the nod from the founders of the museum is that it continues to have an active, if tiny, Jewish community, as well as a non-Jewish population that largely appreciates [the Jewish] presence. Massimo Torrefranco, the Roman-born vice-president of the Jewish community, . . . offers a tour of the [community’s headquarters] at Via Giuseppe Mazzini 95. Originally housing two synagogues (German and Italian), it’s the oldest Jewish communal building in Italy still in use. Damaged in the 2012 Emilia region earthquake, it is currently open only to members of the community.

In 1861, when most of the Italian peninsula’s individual states came together to form the Kingdom of Italy, Ferrara had a Jewish population of about 3,000 in a city of 33,000. . . . [T]he community numbers only 80 today.

On the first floor [of the museum, the exhibit] The Renaissance Speaks Hebrew narrates a groundbreaking perspective that squares with much contemporary academic scholarship: namely, that Jewish involvement in the Renaissance, largely omitted from standard histories, must be rediscovered and studied. “There is no Italian Renaissance without Judaism,” declares Giulio Busi, co-curator of the exhibition, from a monitor at the entrance to the installation, “and we would not be able to imagine Italian Judaism without the Renaissance.”

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.