Upon finishing her graduate degree in education, Caroline Drew, a Methodist from Alabama, was happy to have been offered a job teaching English at an Orthodox girls’ school in New York City. Recounting a variety of cultural adjustments—ranging from wondering whether she, too, should wear a wig, to daily prayers, to the befuddling Jewish calendar, to learning the phrase barukh hashem (“Thank God!”)—she reflects on the experience with sensitivity and humor. She describes chaperoning a class trip to Washington, DC thus:

Our final excursion on the trip is to visit the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Ladies,” [the other teacher] says before we get off the bus, “it will be obvious to everyone else there who we are.” She is saying that [the students’ visible] Jewishness will act as a spotlight. However they behave, people will look and think, “That must be how Jews feels about this history.” I try to imagine the weight of this expectation. I try to remember the aching almost-ness of seventeen. These girls (these almost-women) understand the tragedy of the Holocaust, but these girls (these almost-children) might have a moment, just a moment, when they slip into immaturity. One moment and strangers’ eyes will not likely see a seventeen-year-old girl. They will see a Jew disrespecting the massacre of her people.

I wish I could take this weight from them. But it’s not mine to take. I’ve been to the Holocaust museum in Washington before. While living in the Czech Republic, I visited the Theresienstadt concentration camp and countless other Holocaust memorials around Central Europe. Like others brought up in the American public-school system, I was taught Holocaust novels from third grade on. But none of this prepared me for the museum that day.

My girls—the laughing, singing, picture-snapping, coffee-chugging girls—are silent. Some walk through the exhibits with a friend or two, some alone. They read the plaques. They watch the videos. They listen to the interviews. Nothing is rushed. The longer we are there, the more I find myself watching them. I don’t want to look away. It’s as if, in my mind, their aliveness will counterattack the history behind the glass cases. . . . When I start to cry, I brush the tears away. Whatever I’m feeling, this is not my weight. It is theirs and they bear it with grace.

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.