In March, the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician Yisrael Aumann, a devout Jew, submitted an affidavit in support of several ḥaredi schools that were seeking relief from a set of regulatory fiats issued by New York State’s department of education. In the affidavit Aumann wrote of his own experience attending such schools in the 1930s and 40s, and argued that the education he received there set him on his own distinguished career path. More recently, Aumann has become increasingly concerned by reports from current and former students of ḥaredi schools who believe themselves to have been gravely disadvantaged by the inadequacy of the secular educations they received:

[T]he Jerusalem Talmud [states] that a father must teach his son a trade and thus provide him with a livelihood. In this passage, Rabbi Yehuda puts it most bluntly: “If a father doesn’t teach his son a trade, it’s as if he taught him highway robbery.”

[T]he picture that was painted for me [in private correspondence]—and later confirmed by other ḥasidic graduates and parents of current students—is of young men who often graduate without even the basic skills to operate professionally. In many cases, this leads to poverty, and also to a sense of insuperable handicap. Having left New York well over 60 years ago, all this was a revelation to me.

I stand behind every word in the affidavit. . . . We must continue vehemently to oppose government . . . intrusion in yeshivas. The government has no right to dictate how we run our schools. But as my affidavit indicates, it does have a right to see to it that all children get a basic secular education that will enable them to be productive members of society.

This can be achieved in several ways. One is to allow the state to test the children in agreed-upon subjects and at agreed-upon levels. . . . But we must do something; we cannot continue to disregard both halakhah and the law of the land.

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.