To mark the 30th anniversary of the death of Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the highly influential rebbe of the Lubavitch Hasidim, Tevi Troy recounts his interactions with various American presidents—including a letter to Lyndon Johnson and another from Richard Nixon. One of the defining characteristics of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement under Schneerson’s leadership was its policy of sending emissaries, or shluhim, to college campuses and to remote locations with small Jewish communities. The idea, Troy writes, owes some of its success to President Kennedy:

The rebbe had been sending representatives to Jews in remote locations as far back as 1950, when he sent his first shluhim to Morocco. Yet most Chabad members, often survivors of Hitler and Stalin, understandably wished to calmly settle in the vicinity of Jewish resources like schools, synagogues, and kosher food.

On March 1, 1961, Kennedy issued an executive order creating the Peace Corps, a volunteer service in which Americans would go around the world to help people in developing countries. The next day, March 2, the rebbe told his followers to leave their Brooklyn environs and go help Jews wherever they may be in need. In his speech, the rebbe specifically said that although he had issued a similar call before, now “God is reminding you through the president.”

Jimmy Carter created some permanence to the relationship, establishing an annual Education and Sharing Day in honor of the rebbe. Every president since has signed a statement for that day in honor of the rebbe’s birthday, statements that give insight into how each administration saw how its goals corresponded to the rebbe’s teachings.

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.