Taking as his point of departure Milton Friedman’s 1955 essay “The Role of Government in Education,” Jason Bedrick discusses the history of religion in American public education, the various ways the government could encourage and subsidize private religious schools, the religious-freedom concerns that accompany such funding, and the widely perceived “tuition crisis” affecting Modern Orthodox communities. Bedrick argues that “it would be truer to the spirit of pluralism and freedom in this country [to have] a system that subsidized individuals and families and allowed them to choose the sort of schools that work best for [themselves] and reflect their values.” (Interview by Eric Cohen. Audio, 42 minutes.)

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.