Reversing regulations instituted in 2010 as part of the Affordable Care Act, the Department of Health and Human Services recently allowed employers to request exemptions on religious grounds from providing their employees with insurance coverage for contraceptives. While many on the left see the new rules as an assault on individual rights, Bethany Mandel argues that they are in fact a victory for religious liberty, and one that Jews in particular, whatever their personal opinions on birth control, ought to appreciate.

This “right” to free birth control, which only came into existence with Obamacare less than a decade ago, is now apparently sacrosanct to liberal Jewish groups like the Religious Action Center for Reform Judaism and Bend the Arc Jewish Action, who are opposing the rollout of these new [regulations]. . . .

Jews more than anyone else should respect the sanctity of religious freedom, which is what’s behind the Trump administration’s rollback. . . . And if these Jewish organizations can’t understand why others would oppose abortion, maybe they can understand why companies shouldn’t be forced to pay for something their owners consider a violation of their religion’s core beliefs. We don’t have to agree with these beliefs in order to . . . respect them. . . .

If women choose to use birth control, nobody—neither President Trump nor their employers—can force them not to. And just as nobody should be able to dictate the healthcare choices of American women, we should not be dictating to Americans that they have to violate their religious principles in order do business.

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.