The Holocaust looms large in the consciousness of most Jews in Israel and America—but not, historically, for the ultra-Orthodox. A new museum in Brooklyn is a sign of a major shift in attitudes, as Cathryn J. Prince writes:

[N]ot only is [this] Brooklyn’s first Holocaust museum, it is the first in the U.S. to portray the Shoah from an Orthodox-Jewish perspective. The museum aims to change the ultra-Orthodox community’s approach to the subject. . . .

Julie Golding, the museum’s director of education . . . said she’s [also] encouraged by a change in recent years that has more people in the ultra-Orthodox community reaching out, eager to learn the history.

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.