A lawyer, political scientist, newspaper columnist, and former adviser to New York City mayor John Lindsay, Marvin Schick—who died last week at the age of eighty-five—was best known for his lifelong devotion to the establishment and maintenance of Jewish educational institutions in both the U.S. and Israel. Menachem Butler reflects on Schick’s legacy:

Marvin became a lifelong believer of the importance of a strong Jewish educational system across every denomination—he was particularly pained when non-Orthodox schools shuttered—and served as an early and lone voice [encouraging] philanthropists to place Jewish education high on the communal agenda. As senior adviser to the Avi Chai Foundation, he conducted many pathbreaking studies on Jewish education, and his innovative “Census of Jewish Day Schools in the United States” remains the best source of information about Jewish education over the past generation,

[Schick’s] philosophy of Jewish education [was] that children and their education must never be discarded and that everything must be done to create a more lasting and sustained Jewish community. In Marvin’s earlier years of Jewish communal service, he was active in nearly every major and minor Orthodox Jewish organization—proudly being the only activist in both the (ḥaredi) Agudath Israel and the (Modern Orthodox) Orthodox Union organizations during the 1960s and 1970s. Others saw [his participation in both] as a conflict; he saw it as a fusion. [Likewise], he established organizations that worked across communal boundaries and would fight for the individual Jew however he needed to be helped.

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.