More than 40 years after her death, Ayn Rand remains an influential figure among American libertarians, responsible for changing a set of ideas about political economy into a general philosophical and ethical system. Born in St. Petersburg in 1905 as Alisa Rosenbaum, she is rarely thought of as a Russian Jewish writer, but that is what she was. Gary Saul Morson notes, however, that Rand “never identified with Judaism and after she arrived in America in 1926 assiduously avoided mentioning it.”

Morson dismantles a recent attempt to demonstrate that there is anything especially Jewish about Rand’s work or thought. Instead, Morson argues that “her thought was Russian to the core,” a product of a radical tradition that insists on unquestionable more absolutes:

Rand’s fiction closely resembles Soviet socialist realism except for preaching the opposite politics. Call it capitalist realism. . . . Rand differed from the radicals on one key issue. For them, socialism solved all questions; for her, it was capitalism. In almost all other respects, their views coincided. Both embraced militant atheism and regarded religion as the main source of evil, for Marxist radicals because it was “the opiate of the masses” and for Rand because it preached “irrationalism” and altruism.

Morson also comments on the absence of children in Rand’s work:

Children require sacrifice: this obvious fact indicates that people are not, and can never be, fully independent. Rand’s heroes and heroines apparently arrive at adulthood without having gone through childhood, let alone infancy. It is as if she believed that, like Athena springing fully grown from Zeus’s head, people are created by sudden flashes of insight. My point is not just that infants are utterly dependent on another person and that children only gradually learn to take care of themselves. It is also that no one chooses when, where, and to whom to be born. Unlike [her fictional hero] Howard Roark, people always inherit something they did not choose.

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.