Since the middle of the last century, blacks in the U.S. have been consistently loyal in their support of the Democratic party—loyalty that, as the recent study Steadfast Democrats shows—cuts across economic, religious, and even political divides. Michael Weingrad notes that many of the book’s observations can be applied to the political lives of American Jews:

What I find most intriguing about Steadfast Democrats and . . . why I think it is a book with relevance for observers of Jewish political behavior, is that the authors recognize that politics can become a key component of group identity. It is not that black political solidarity has not historically had crucial benefits for black Americans but that, whether or not those benefits still exist or are cost-effective today, they have become associated over time with black identity itself.

Although Steadfast Democrats mentions Jews but once in passing, they are second only to blacks in the extent to which they similarly defy factors that would in most cases tilt their political identification away from the Democratic party.

Also, as with blacks, explanations for Jewish political behavior are plentiful if not terribly convincing. Liberal Jews are frequently wont to cite religious tradition to explain their politics, as in the catchphrase tikkun olam (about which I have written). Some Jewish progressives do engage seriously with Jewish tradition as they articulate their social-justice politics, yet many invocations of religious tradition by Jewish liberals tend to be misinformed and opportunistic.

Other analyses of American Jewish political behavior, Weingrad argues, are more convincing—but fail “to explain either Jewish identification with the Democratic party today or why Jews in other Western countries today do not have the same loyalty to their liberal and left-wing parties as American Jews do for the Democrats.” The simple truth is that American Jewish group identity has come to include an enduring loyalty to the Democratic party.

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.