In 1936, the German heavyweight boxer Max Schmeling faced off against Joe Louis at Yankee Stadium, in what became the first loss of Louis’s professional career. When the two fought again, in the same venue, two years later, spectators saw the match as a contest between a representative of a state that had embraced racism as its guiding principle, and an African American. But, writes Dean Karayanis—drawing on an interview with the veteran Jewish sportswriter Jerry Izenberg, who listened to the 1938 fight on the radio as a boy—Schmeling was hardly the avatar of Nazi Germany spectators on either side of the Atlantic imagined:

President Franklin Roosevelt, Mr. Izenberg said, “let it be known he had called Louis and said, ‘You’re fighting for America. You’ve got to do this,’ and Louis was ready to go.” He chuckles at the narrative now. “That’s according to the myth.”

Later, Mr. Izenberg got to know both men. “Schmeling,” he told me, “wasn’t fighting for Hitler. He was fighting because he beat this guy, [Louis], once. He was too old to win the title, everybody said, but he could win it now. That’s what motivated him.”

Schmeling, meanwhile, fought Hitler’s overtures to join the Nazi Party and on Kristallnacht, even hid two Jewish brothers in his apartment. “Max asked me several times over the years not to mention it, . . . not to ‘glorify’ him,” one of the brothers, Henri Lewin, said in 1989. “He told me that what he’d done for me and my brother Werner in 1938 was ‘doing the duty of a man.’”

After so much hype, the rematch ended just two minutes and four seconds into the first round. This time, it was Schmeling who was beaten into submission. When his trainer threw in the towel, America rejoiced, but the man they’d cast as a Nazi stooge carried no hard feelings. When Louis died in 1981, Schmeling was a pallbearer and helped pay for his funeral.

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.