The events of the past year, noted Eric Cohen in his speech to the Jewish Leadership Conference last week, have given the Jews ample reason to indulge their well-known penchant for worrying. Surveying some of these causes for concern, he reflected on the best way to respond:

Around the world—from the Poway synagogue shooting, to the Holocaust-haunted streets of Berlin, to the Orthodox neighborhoods of Borough Park—the number of physical assaults on Jews, simply for being Jews, is on the rise. To the mad white supremacist, the Jew is vermin. To the radical “woke” activist, the Jew is a fascist. And to the Islamic fundamentalist, the Jew is an infidel.

Yet stand up to them all we will.

Around the world—even in America—a campaign has begun to treat the rituals, rites, and beliefs of traditional Jews as backward and bigoted. Bans on kosher food. Bans on circumcision. Efforts to shut down Jewish schools for focusing too much on the transmission of Jewish identity. Efforts to ostracize traditional Jews who do not acquiesce in progressive dogmas about gender and marriage.

Amid these many concerns, we also face the slow but steady withering of Jewish identity here at home. The tragic reality is that too many Jews in America have only a fading attachment to the miracle and majesty, the wisdom and weight, the rites and responsibilities, of being a Jew. In the end, we cannot control the perverted ideologies of our enemies. But the transmission of Jewish civilization falls solely upon us: committed Jews, awed by the Jewish past, sober about the Jewish present, and hopeful about the Jewish future.

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.