In The Last Rabbi, William Kolbrener, a scholar of Milton, uses literary criticism and psychoanalysis to understand the philosophical works of the great 20th-century luminary. (Interview by Alan Brill).

Soloveitchik writes in [his theological treatise] Halakhic Man of what he considers to be the primary Jewish imperative, for man to “create himself.” Seen from this perspective, Soloveitchik’s philosophical writings serve as a kind of spiritual memoir, the means by which he creates himself through writing. Halakhic Man, for example, is about his father, his uncle [both distinguished rabbis], but also about himself, as he at once declares allegiance to his ancestors but also asserts independence from some of the traditions they represent. Repentance or t’shuvah is critical for Soloveitchik—throughout his works—as a form of story-telling about the self, one which allows for constant self-critique and continued self-construction.

Recognition of failure plays an important role in Soloveitchik’s emotional journey, and in the stories he tells about himself. Where, in childhood memories, failure is embarrassing or even shameful, later in his life both failure and suffering are transformed, retroactively becoming marks of distinction, indeed of existential chosenness. . . .

Indeed, I call him the “last rabbi” because of [his] self-perceived (and self-represented) failure as a teacher, his ostensible inability to communicate [what he calls the] “Torah of the heart” [alongside the more cerebral teachings]. While engaging his students intellectually, he was not able, he confesses, to solicit “growth on the experiential plane,” or to bestow his “personal warmth on them.” That is, Soloveitchik may have emphasized creativity and self-creation to such an extent, may have become so much the individual, that he transformed himself into the last rabbi.

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.