In a historical novel with more than a touch of fantasy, Emily Barton imagines that Khazaria—the Central Asian empire whose rulers, according to legend, converted to Judaism in the 8th century CE—survives into the 20th century and is under attack by the Third Reich. The Book of Esther also features a transsexual warrior princess (the protagonist and title character), mechanical horses, and a village of kabbalists who use their magical powers to create an army of golems who will fight the Nazis. In her review of this “imaginative, engrossing, and entertaining” book, Dara Horn writes:

Barton has talent to spare, and while her pacing and tone are occasionally ponderous, her imagination makes the story as addicting as a Jewish Game of Thrones. The novel’s invented world is considerably more persuasive than the characters populating it, but this hardly gets in the way of the adventure. More distinctively, Barton explores religious culture with remarkable warmth. For those familiar with Judaism, one of the book’s unexpected pleasures is just how unexotic these exotic Khazars turn out to be. (I’ve attended many Sabbath dinners like Esther’s, with fewer golems.)

Yet a load-bearing premise like this one, predicated not merely on the Holocaust but on the real-life absence of golems to stop it, demands more than entertainment. . . . Why this story now? . . .

While Barton’s novel is hardly political, you can’t read it without thinking of the almost supernatural resurrection of anti-Semitism that has taken place in recent years and its attendant indignities—one of which is the reduction of a majestic civilization to a degrading public posture of self-defense. The un-cynical purity with which Barton imagines her Jewish kingdom is like a literary Sabbath for those weary of today’s jihadists and Internet trolls. At the book’s ambiguous end, it’s reassuring to remember that in reality this civilization still thrives.

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.