On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Jews traditionally use a special prayer book known as a maḥzor. The Jewish Weekly provides a timeline of the major U.S. maḥzorim, beginning with the Reform movement’s edition published in 1894:

First published in the 1890s and slightly revised periodically for decades, this maḥzor and the accompanying Shabbat and daily prayer book [the Union Prayer Book] came shortly after the Reform movement’s landmark 1884 Pittsburgh Platform. In accordance with that document, it excised references to the messiah, the future ingathering of Jewish exiles in Israel, and other ideas deemed insufficiently modern. The Union Prayer Book was a definitive ingredient of 20th-century classical Reform—its King James-style English was stentorian [and] its fragments of Hebrew few and far between; it rejected particularism in theology, while embracing Protestantism aesthetically.

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.