On Wednesday, Jews the world over celebrated the conclusion of the seven-year cycle of Talmud study known as daf yomi [“daily page”]. Begun by the Polish rabbi Meir Shapiro in 1923, the regimen involves the study of a single folio page of the Babylonian Talmud every day on a fixed schedule. The editors of the New York Sun write:

[The daf yomi] prospered over what, for Jews, stands as one of the most tumultuous centuries in the three-and-a-half millennia since Sinai. Through that blood-soaked span, it turns out that Jewish learning spread like wildfire.

In America, the [Orthodox group] Agudath Israel eventually had to rent Madison Square Garden to accommodate all those who wanted to be together for the final reading of the daf yomi cycle. It is always a memorable event; Torah sages, in black robes, gray beards, and elegant hats, are seated on a vast dais. The bleachers are filled with thousands who follow along in the Hebrew and Aramaic. By 2012, the event had grown so enormous that Madison Square Garden was too small. So it was moved to the Meadowlands stadium, where attendance [likely came] close to 100,000.

The event in New Jersey, moreover, will be just one gathering among many taking place, on the same page and day, around the world. What an answer to the anti-Semitism that is sputtering in America, Europe, and the Middle East. The haters may strike from the left and right. It turns out, though, that they have not been able to force a retreat from Judaism and the study of its texts.

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.