The Talmud, writes Simon Holloway, is replete with jokes and wordplay, and mentions rabbis using humor to maintain their students’ attention. But the rabbis were also wary of excessive mirth:

A famous maxim has it that one of the ways in which the Torah is acquired is through a reduction of merriment, and Rabbi Shimon ben Yoḥai rules that one is forbidden to fill one’s mouth with laughter in this world. . . .

An aversion to mockery may have underlined the reason behind a prohibition of theaters and circuses, and may have also been the reason behind Rabbi Zeira’s not laughing at Rabbi Yirmiyah’s terrible joke in Tractate Niddah—although it really is a terrible joke. Rabbi Akiva . . . once remarked that levity brings one to lewdness, and that references to “mirth” in the Torah are all references to idolatry. Since he himself employs humor as a pedagogical tool, it may be that he had in mind this distinction between mockery and other legitimate forms of making fun.

Indeed, the different motivations of those who attempt to make others laugh is important, with parodying scholars being universally condemned. Rabbi Yirmiyah, whose tasteless attempt at humor . . . was the subject of no small amount of controversy, . . . was even thrown out of the academy for one of his terrible jokes.

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.