Located on West 47th Street in Manhattan—not far from Times Square—the Actors’ Temple still holds regular services, having been revived about a decade ago when it came close to shutting its doors. Its primary connection to the theater district today is that it rents its space for off-Broadway performances on weekdays, but it was once a magnet for celebrities, as Josefin Dolsten recounts:

The Three Stooges, the actors Shelley Winters and Aaron Chwatt (better known as Red Buttons), the baseball stars Sandy Koufax and Hank Greenberg, and the television host Ed Sullivan all prayed there. Sullivan, whose wife was Jewish [but he himself was not], also hosted the annual temple benefit at the Majestic Theater. Headshots of stars who frequented the synagogue hang on a wall.

The synagogue was founded in 1917 for a very different crowd: Orthodox shopkeepers who worked in Hell’s Kitchen, a neighborhood lined today with bars and restaurants catering to the pre-theater crowd but which at the time was rife with gangs.

In the 1920s, the synagogue, formerly known as Congregation Ezrath Israel, hired Bernard Birstein as its first rabbi. Birstein had his eyes on Broadway, which was home to many Jewish actors and actresses but few regular synagogue-goers. . . . One of Birstein’s first recruits was the popular Ukrainian-born entertainer Sophie Tucker, [famous for singing “My Yiddishe Mama”]. After Tucker, other stars started flowing in.

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.