Today some ḥasidic communities, keeping alive a venerable Ashkenazi custom, refrain from studying Torah in the evening on December 24, usually staying home and playing chess or cards. Itzik Gottesman examines various explanations as to why:

Older Jewish religious texts instructed all Jews to stay home on Christmas Eve because Christians might attack or even kill them. Historically speaking, however, far more acts of violence were committed against Jews during Easter, when Christians mark the day Jesus died, than during Christmas, when he was born.

Over the centuries, these dangers generated a substantial folklore. Jews believed that on Christmas Eve, the Christian deity flew around and controlled the night. If any Jew were to open a Jewish holy text that night, that spirit could appear at any time and defile the holy book.

Jews also had fears and traditions surrounding the winter solstice, which falls a few days before Christmas. . . . Jews believed that on this night when the seasons changed, the earth was left unprotected. An old tradition connected to the winter solstice was to cover all pots that held well water so that the water would not be contaminated.

Much, but not all, of this changed when Jews came to America. Indeed, Gottesman notes, even the religiously conservative Yiddish newspaper Morgn Zhurnal published numerous advertisements from local businesses wishing their Jewish customers freylekhn (happy) Christmas.

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.