The shooting at a kosher grocery store in New Jersey, in which four people were murdered, and the stabbing last weekend at a Hanukkah party in New York’s Rockland County—one victim is thought unlikely to recover—come on the heels of a longstanding trend of assaults on visibly Orthodox Jews. Eli Steinberg, himself a member of an Orthodox community in New Jersey, argues that such assaults have turned deadly because for so long they were ignored by the authorities and by society more broadly:

The animus against Orthodox Jews has been here for some time now, but in a more underhanded way, which made it easier to excuse and ignore. It has been here as towns and municipalities [such as] Chester in upstate New York [and] Jackson in central New Jersey used municipal planning and zoning laws to keep Orthodox Jews out.

It has been here in the way the media cover us, from highlighting negative stories involving Orthodox Jews inordinately and framing them in a way that reflects poorly on us all, to allowing people with an ax to grind against us to make whatever accusations they want about us with little to no substantiation.

And it has been here in the way some politicians talk about us, and how they get away with it. Few of us have forgotten the way Michael Bloomberg, in his closing days as mayor of New York, boasted to the Atlantic that he “took on” the Orthodox on a circumcision practice. “Who wants to have 10,000 guys in black hats,” he said, “outside your office, screaming?” Few of us have forgotten, but who else even noticed it at the time?

Acts of solidarity, such as marches and public statements, are an excellent start, but they are only a start. What is needed is a real change in how people relate to Orthodox Jews. . . . Sure, we look and dress differently, and our value system is much more traditional, putting us at odds with much of modern society. But we are, after all, still human beings.

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.