There are two things that vex most American in equal degrees: the rise of anti-Semitism and the fate of Israel.

These two issues preoccupy ordinary people across this country in the same way — which is to say, very little.

Why would they? Jews are not a persecuted minority here — they seem to be doing fine. And Israel shares a common attribute with the rest of the world: it is not America.

Even during the best of times, the interests of Americans tend not to stray too far or long outside these borders. Most of the rest of the world is after all an ocean away.

And during these economically troubled times, that inward focus here has become even more entrenched, surpassing that in just about any other country.

In a recent Ipsos survey, 89 percent of Americans polled agreed that this country needs to focus less on the world, and more at home. Support for this sentiment was higher in the U.S. than in any of the other 23 countries surveyed.

Why then is it that the contestants for the GOP presidential primary nomination often seem like they are running for election to the Knesset?

There are competing theories.

Since 2008, Jewish support for Barack Obama has eroded and in swing states like Florida, a small shift in favor of the Republicans could be decisive. So the hunt is on for stray Jewish votes. But is that a hunt that should figure so prominently at a national level?

And then there’s a statistic Charles Krauthammer plucked — as far as I can tell — out of thin air: “98 percent of pro-Israeli Americans are gentile.”

Maybe he’s right — though a more interesting number is 41 percent. That’s the size of the minority of Americans of any faith who regard Israel as an ally of the United States.

Krauthammer’s point seems to be that Republican candidates have as much if not more interest in winning the Christian Zionist vote than in looking for support from the heavily Democratic Jewish community.

But there’s another factor here, a covert reason that American politicians of all political stripes see rewards in trumpeting their affection for the Jewish state — it is what might be called the 9/11 dividend.

Benjamin Netanyahu recognized the value of the 9/11 attacks when within hours of them taking place he said they were a “good thing” and they would “strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we’ve experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror.”

In other words, Israel would in the minds of many Americans come to signify the antithesis of the Islamic threat. Support for Israel would become a coded way of expressing fear of Muslims and their religion.

Political correctness — which mostly serves as a finishing school for bigots — dictates that overt Islamophobia is reserved for those on the rabid right, like Pamela Geller, who have no shame in expressing bald hostility. But for those who harbor their fears more discreetly, the nemesis can be placed in the shadow of their declared affection.

To say how much one cares about Israel, says much more about how one views its neighbors. All this is about is cultivating solidarity and accumulating political capital through the promotion of fear.

Christopher Hitchens died last night.

The strange thing about death — especially the death of a public figure — is that it evokes in most onlookers the desire to revisit a life rather than view its conclusion.

Hitchens’ obituaries will perpetuate this death-denying ritual, but thankfully he offered his readers an opportunity to bravely look at a future from which most of us would rather turn away.

Having in recent years watched the wretched process of my mother’s death at a ripe 87 along with that of my brother-in-law with cancer at 48, I asked my doctor whether in his experience dying is usually so grim. His response: it depends what you believe. His claim (and arguably this may have been nothing more than his own belief) was that those with faith can die peacefully. Maybe.

What seems clear nevertheless, is that the “gift” of modern medicine has been too often to make slow-motion something that mercifully would be far more swift.

In his final piece for Vanity Fair, Hitchens relates his own experience to that of another famous atheist and explains why he no longer believes that whatever doesn’t kill you will make you stronger.

The late Professor Sidney Hook was a famous materialist and pragmatist, who wrote sophisticated treatises that synthesized the work of John Dewey and Karl Marx. He too was an unrelenting atheist. Toward the end of his long life he became seriously ill and began to reflect on the paradox that — based as he was in the medical mecca of Stanford, California — he was able to avail himself of a historically unprecedented level of care, while at the same time being exposed to a degree of suffering that previous generations might not have been able to afford. Reasoning on this after one especially horrible experience from which he had eventually recovered, he decided that he would after all rather have died:

I lay at the point of death. A congestive heart failure was treated for diagnostic purposes by an angiogram that triggered a stroke. Violent and painful hiccups, uninterrupted for several days and nights, prevented the ingestion of food. My left side and one of my vocal cords became paralyzed. Some form of pleurisy set in, and I felt I was drowning in a sea of slime. In one of my lucid intervals during those days of agony, I asked my physician to discontinue all life-supporting services or show me how to do it.

The physician denied this plea, rather loftily assuring Hook that “someday I would appreciate the unwisdom of my request.” But the stoic philosopher, from the vantage point of continued life, still insisted that he wished he had been permitted to expire. He gave three reasons. Another agonizing stroke could hit him, forcing him to suffer it all over again. His family was being put through a hellish experience. Medical resources were being pointlessly expended. In the course of his essay, he used a potent phrase to describe the position of others who suffer like this, referring to them as lying on “mattress graves.”

If being restored to life doesn’t count as something that doesn’t kill you, then what does? And yet there seems no meaningful sense in which it made Sidney Hook “stronger.” Indeed, if anything, it seems to have concentrated his attention on the way in which each debilitation builds on its predecessor and becomes one cumulative misery with only one possible outcome. After all, if it were otherwise, then each attack, each stroke, each vile hiccup, each slime assault, would collectively build one up and strengthen resistance. And this is plainly absurd. So we are left with something quite unusual in the annals of unsentimental approaches to extinction: not the wish to die with dignity but the desire to have died.