Day schools are a powerful tool in ensuring lifelong commitment to Judaism, but the number of non-Orthodox Jews enrolling their children in such schools has been in steep decline. To reverse the current trend, argues Liel Leibovitz, some things will have to change:

Let’s begin with the lowest hanging fruit, Jewish foundations and philanthropists who, while talking so brave and so sweet about Jewish continuity and other buzzwords, have failed to provide the basic infrastructure for Jewish education to thrive. . . . [N]ot a single Jewish federation—organizations whose only raison d’être should be answering challenges like this one—has made education a serious priority.

The fault is also, finally, ours. Many of us non-Orthodox Jews can’t afford the exorbitant cost of Jewish education. Many more prefer more cosmopolitan, multifaceted educational environments. That’s perfectly understandable. Others, however, are in a position to pledge their resources and make Jewish education a priority and yet choose to limit their engagement with Jewish life to vague laments about the disappearance of liberal Judaism and mild nostalgia for its glory days. That’s a shame. If we realign our commitments and our budgets, we can change the numbers on Jewish education and, with it, just about every other statistic we deem vital to the preservation and prosperity of a robust and diverse Jewish community.

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.