Seattle’s Jewish Transcript has appeared without interruption since 1924, sometimes playing a mediating role between the city’s Ashkenazi and Sephardi communities. A look at the paper’s early days suggests that Jewish communal preoccupations have changed little. Hannah Pressman writes:

A single page of the Jewish Transcript yields a trove of insights into the pressing concerns of Washington’s Jews in the 1920s. Then, as now, assimilation and the risks of cultural adaptation were prominent themes. My eye was immediately drawn to a serious-looking headline, “Is the Yiddish Language Doomed to Die Very Soon in the United States?” In the wake of the Immigration Act of 1924, . . . the article’s author worried that the immigration quota would “kill Yiddish” by drastically reducing the Jewish readership of Yiddish newspapers. However, a survey of “newsdealers” yielded the interesting observation that “the buyer of Yiddish newspaper buys an English paper at the same time,” proof that, at least in the late 1920s, American Jewish citizens still held on to their mame loshen.

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.