In 1937, Partisan Review—newly reconstituted after its break with the Communist party—published a short story by the poet Delmore Schwartz titled “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” which the editors chose to place in front of contributions from Wallace Stevens, Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, and Pablo Picasso. In this eerie and unusual story, the narrator experiences watching his own parents’ courtship on a movie screen. Ruth R. Wisse argues that its publication constituted an American debut of literary modernism, but also a uniquely Jewish kind of literary modernism:

It comes as no surprise that when he wrote this story Delmore was reading Kafka’s The Trial, in which the narrator wakes up on the morning of his thirtieth birthday to find himself under arrest. In Kafka there is no named city, no established time, no patronym or firm identification, and no actual crime or possibility of exoneration. Josef K.’s main problem is deracination, and the resulting insecurity of his status determines his doom: he is killed “like a dog.”

Delmore revises Kafka in the process of adapting him to liberal, transparent America. We are given to know that the father will not become a mature husband and that his son will grow up unhappy. One can see Willy Loman [of Arthur Miller’s Death of Salesman] waiting in the wings as the American Jewish father, along with [Philip Roth’s] Alexander Portnoy as the American Jewish son.

The story’s relation to modernism is likewise instructive: . . . it tells a real story in an imagined context, introduces the medium of film into the medium of fiction, arrests and manipulates the normal narrative sequence, and comments on the story while telling it. But Delmore also avoided some of the pitfalls of modernism. He evokes the reality of a Jewish family in Brooklyn, and if he does not emphasize with their Jewishness it is only to the degree that they no longer live by its mores. In giving us an actual family that matters very much to him, he overcomes one of the handicaps of modernist writing that too often fails fully to engage us emotionally. . . . Writing from the depths of his experience, Delmore’s Jewish modernism was specific enough to be recognizable and deeply affecting.

He was, in fact, the first in that Partisan Review coterie to recognize that literary modernism confronted Jews with a special problem. Some of its greatest practitioners were openly anti-Semitic, and the movement’s antipathy to family, community, and nation made it generally antagonistic to the Jewish people. Jews were inherently bourgeois.

Yesterday, Israel’s Channel 12 reported that Israeli representatives have been involved in secret talks, brokered by the United Arab Emirates, with their Syrian counterparts about the potential establishment of diplomatic relations between their countries. Even more surprisingly, on Wednesday an Israeli reporter spoke with a senior official from Syria’s information ministry, Ali al-Rifai. The prospect of a member of the Syrian government, or even a private citizen, giving an on-the-record interview to an Israeli journalist was simply unthinkable under the old regime. What’s more, his message was that Damascus seeks peace with other countries in the region, Israel included.

These developments alone should make Israelis sanguine about Donald Trump’s overtures to Syria’s new rulers. Yet the interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa’s jihadist resumé, his connections with Turkey and Qatar, and brutal attacks on minorities by forces aligned with, or part of, his regime remain reasons for skepticism. While recognizing these concerns, Noah Rothman nonetheless makes the case for optimism:

The old Syrian regime was an incubator and exporter of terrorism, as well as an Iranian vassal state. The Assad regime trained, funded, and introduced terrorists into Iraq intent on killing American soldiers. It hosted Iranian terrorist proxies as well as the Russian military and its mercenary cutouts. It was contemptuous of U.S.-backed proscriptions on the use of chemical weapons on the battlefield, necessitating American military intervention—an unavoidable outcome, clearly, given Barack Obama’s desperate efforts to avoid it. It incubated Islamic State as a counterweight against the Western-oriented rebel groups vying to tear that regime down, going so far as to purchase its own oil from the nascent Islamist group.

The Assad regime was an enemy of the United States. The Sharaa regime could yet be a friend to America. . . . Insofar as geopolitics is a zero-sum game, taking Syria off the board for Russia and Iran and adding it to the collection of Western assets would be a triumph. At the very least, it’s worth a shot. Trump deserves credit for taking it.