The rabbinic scholar Saul Lieberman, who died in 1983, was famed for his comprehensive knowledge of talmudic literature, his meticulous scholarship, and his synthesis of traditional learning with modern academic methodology. Spending most of his adult life as a professor at the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary, he also maintained warm relations with leading Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox rabbis. Recent attempts to classify him in today’s denominational terms, argues David Golinkin, are both misguided and groundless:

Lieberman did not consider himself “Conservative.” However, neither did he consider himself “Orthodox.”. . . Lieberman meant exactly what he said in his letter to [the Israeli newspaper] Maariv in 1974: “I teach Torah to the Jewish people and I don’t care much about politics—that is: I am neither ‘Orthodox’ nor ‘Conservative.’ There are ‘Conservative’ rabbis who are halakhic and there are ‘Orthodox’ rabbis who are not.” Lieberman did not care about labels but rather about substance, and in this he was a true disciple of Rabbi Judah the Prince who said . . . “do not look at the vessel, but rather at its substance.”

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.