The numerous reports of the death of Judaism’s Conservative movement have been exaggerated, write Jack Wertheimer, Steven Bayme, and Steven M. Cohen. Conservative Jews indeed make up a smaller proportion of American Jewry than they did a few decades ago, but by other metrics the denomination is in no danger:

[Firstly], the Conservative proportion of the non-Orthodox Jewish population is holding steady. . . . What’s more, Conservative Jews have higher birthrates than Reform and non-denominationally identified Jews. Their intermarriage rate is [also] far lower than for other non-Orthodox Jews. For those marrying since 2000, 39 percent of Conservative-raised Jews married non-Jews, as compared to roughly 80 percent for those raised as Reform or nondenominational. Conservative Jews are far more likely to enroll their children in more intensive forms of Jewish schooling and summer camping than other non-Orthodox Jews.

Among members of Conservative and Reform synagogues, large gaps open between them when they are asked about their attachment to Israel, attendance at Shabbat services, involvement with Jewish organizations, and the importance of being Jewish in their lives. On all of these and other measures of Jewish involvement, Conservative congregants are far more engaged than their Reform counterparts.

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.