Lisa Schwartzbaum describes a recent Jewish “heritage tour” in Central Europe that visited various cities along the Danube River and explored their Jewish past and present. On her stay in the cities of Bratislava and Vienna, she writes:

[Bratislava’s] mournful Jewish centerpiece is the underground mausoleum of the rabbi and sage Moshe Schreiber (1762-1839), known as Hatam Sofer. The cemetery in which he was buried—itself built atop a 17th-century Jewish graveyard—was upended during and after World War II. But the rabbi’s tomb survived, along with the graves of some twenty other rabbis, albeit shut away under a concrete tunnel.

The site was reconstructed and rededicated in 2002, in all its gloomy, claustrophobic, end-of-the-line pathos. The old Jewish neighborhood, meanwhile, was smashed decades ago by Communist construction—ugly in intention and result. There are very few Jews and an army of shadows in this exhausted Slovakian city. . . .

[The next day], we were in Vienna, as rigorously stately and aloof in its elegance as Bratislava is exasperated and down at the heel. Ah, Vienna, where vanished Jewish life leaves a uniquely conflicted legacy, a mixture of pride and humiliation, sophistication and hurt.

At the bright, modern Jewish Museum Vienna, visitors’ bags and passports were examined with grim concentration. But then, at Vienna’s main synagogue, . . . our crowd had the great luck to arrive in time for a Thursday bar mitzvah. The young man was from a Bukharan family—immigrants from Eastern Europe, Russia, and former Soviet republics are the last best hope for restocking Jewish places of worship in the region—and we were thrilled to join in the traditional pelting of the bar-mitzvah boy with a volley of little candies. Later, the clan’s granny broke away from a family celebration in the synagogue vestibule to offer us slices of sweet melon.

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.