In recent years, state and federal courts have repeatedly been faced with the questions of whether governmental grants and programs can provide money to churches, seminaries, and other religious institutions without running afoul of the First Amendment or state constitutions, and, conversely, whether withholding such funds constitutes prohibited religious discrimination. Michael Helfand, examining the sometimes-contradictory rulings on the matter, sees—and applauds—an emerging tendency for the Supreme Court to allow, or even require, religious institutions to be eligible for government largess:

[J]ust this past Thursday, the New Jersey supreme court punted on a . . . case addressing New Jersey’s “Building Our Future Bond Act,” which provided funds for capital-improvement projects for institutions of higher education. Among other institutions, both Beth Medrash Govoha (BMG) in Lakewood and Princeton Theological Seminary received funds under this program—approximately $10.6 million and $650,000 respectively. . . . At issue for the court was whether the funds would ultimately be used for conduct and purposes that it could describe as wholly religious. . . . Thus, while BMG clearly expressed that its programs included significant amounts of religious study, it also highlighted that less than 5 percent of its students pursue [rabbinic] ordination. . . .

Ultimately, the [U.S.] Supreme Court has allowed for the exclusion of religious institutions from government funding in the narrow set of cases where [providing such funding] would put the state in the position of using tax dollars to support the ministry. But veering away from those narrow historical confines, the Supreme Court has emphasized that excluding a religious institution from “benefits for which it is otherwise qualified” is “odious to our Constitution.”

And maybe, notwithstanding all this constitutional messiness, that approach—prohibiting religious discrimination in government funding except in the narrowest of circumstances—provides the best option for courts going forward. Accordingly, . . . maybe once the state is granting funding for higher education, then it should not be able to exclude a subset of institutions of higher education simply because they primarily pursue the rigorous study of religion.

At bottom, when adjudicating claims of religious discrimination in government funding, courts are thrust into a clash of values between [the] non-establishment [clause] and neutrality. But in parsing cases that fall uncomfortably between the two, courts might be wise to embrace an approach that defaults to putting religious and secular institutions on equal footing. No doubt, there may be hazards in adopting such an approach. But the hazards of tolerating the singling out of religious individuals and institutions for unequal treatment seem far greater.

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.