In her recent memoir Mixed Messages, Eleanor Foa recounts her and her sister’s quest to uncover their family’s history in Italy following their mother’s death. Born in that country just before World War II, Foa had left with her parents for the U.S. as infant—just before it was too late for Jews like them to escape. Diane Cole, calling the book a “charming . . . jumble of family and historical research, emotional introspection, and convivial travelogue,” describes what they found:

In the medieval town of Soragna, [located not far from Parma], the sisters uncover the first local memories of their family lineage. At the Parmigiano Reggiano Museum, the wife of the farming couple that owns the museum comments that “Foa is a distinguished name in Soragna.”

Few traces of Soragna’s Jewish community remain; the one building that still stands had served as the town’s synagogue since at least 1584. By 1855, the Jewish community was large enough to finance an exuberant neoclassical-style renovation of the building, with Corinthian columns and a barrel-vaulted ceiling. In 1939, it was confiscated by the Fascist government. After the war, with a dwindling Jewish community—the last member died in 1971—it was abandoned altogether. Forty years after Mussolini had taken it, a patron brought new life to the synagogue building as a regional museum of Jewish life and history.

Foa also finds her family’s name in archival records. In a notation dating to 1547, Giuseppe Foa is described as the owner of a local lending bank. Foa is perplexed; her father, had always claimed he (and his daughters) had inherited a genetic incompetence with anything to do with money (notwithstanding his success as an economist who flew first class and stayed in four-star hotels at his clients’ expense). In his typewritten history, [the elder Foa] began the family story in 1551, just four years after the notation about his moneylending ancestor, whom he never mentioned.

Had her father not known about Giuseppe? Or was he ashamed of the stereotype of the Jew as usurer? Had her father perhaps used this narrative of financial incompetence as a way to distance himself from anti-Semitic stereotypes about Jews and money?

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.