When Raizel Berger was sent to Auschwitz from her home in Transylvania, she brought a siddur with her, hidden in her stockings. Raizel’s granddaughter, Sarah Rindner, reflects on this object, which survived the war along with its owner, and remains in her family’s possession:

The young women in [Raizel’s] bunker, mostly ḥasidic Jews from Romania and Hungary, took turns praying from [the siddur] each night. One of the girls worked in the kitchen and snuck out a potato sack to use as a cover for the siddur, onto which she used a rough yarn to embroider a beautiful star of David in the center. The pages of the siddur are delicate with age, but the section containing the Psalms is particularly worn from repeated use.

After the war, my grandmother married my grandfather, a Holocaust survivor from Poland. They moved to the United States and had four daughters in quick succession. The siddur continued to be used on a daily basis in their brownstone home in Brooklyn. . . . In unsentimental fashion typical of Jews of my grandparents’ type, the siddur was not treated as a talisman. At some point, someone even scrawled a phone number on the inside cover.

Since the Shoah, much has been written about the place of the Holocaust in Jewish memory and theology. This discussion, understandably, often focuses on the Holocaust as a kind of inflection point in the relationship and covenant between God and the Jewish people. Yet, for some Jews like my grandmother who lived through the horror itself, there is perhaps more continuity between the pre- and post-Holocaust eras than those abstract discussions assume. Like her siddur—smuggled into Auschwitz, but also consistently and faithfully prayed from in a Brooklyn home long after the events of the war receded into history.

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.