Laura Z. Hobson’s The Gentleman’s Agreement, a best-selling 1947 novel, brought American “genteel” anti-Semitism into the limelight, especially after it was turned into a movie. It was preceded, and partially inspired, by a Canadian novel called Earth and High Heaven, also a loosely autobiographical account of interfaith romance and concealed but intense anti-Semitism. The author of the latter, Gwethalyn Graham, was a Canadian Christian who had had a romance with a Jew, while Hobson was a Jew who had fallen in love with a gentile. Both novels were part of a wave, writes Rachel Gordan:

The 1940s were a decade when several novelists tackled the topic of anti-Semitism. Saul Bellow’s The Victim (1947) and Arthur Miller’s Focus (1945) are among the more highly regarded of these novels today, in large part due to their authors’ status in the pantheon of American Jewish writers. Yet middlebrow novels, including Graham’s and Laura Z. Hobson’s, had greater impact on readers. Magazine serialization, bestseller status, and news of their purchase by Hollywood studios contributed to their popularity in the 1940s. With brief or no mention of the horrific anti-Semitism of wartime Europe, these novels were praised for holding up a mirror to bigotry at home even as North American soldiers fought more frightening instances of racial hatred abroad. To American commentators, these “social-protest novels” filled a uniquely American need to feel superior to their wartime enemies when it came to questions of national morality. To wring one’s hands over the discrimination of country clubs, hotels, and playgrounds—against the backdrop of Nazi Germany—was a variation on today’s “humble brag.” The United States and Canada may have had problems when it came to anti-Semitism, but in comparison to Europe’s, it was impossible to deny that theirs was the lesser evil.

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.