In 1940, three of the great Zionist leaders of the day—Chaim Weizmann, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, and David Ben-Gurion—traveled separately to the U.S. to raise funds, recruit volunteers, and seek support in Washington for a Jewish army that would fight against Nazi Germany. These efforts, all of which came to naught, are the subject of Rick Richman’s Racing against History. (An excerpt can be read here.) Jonathan Silver writes in his review:

In mid-June [of this year], the American Jewish Committee published a study documenting just how differently American Jews and Israelis think about the Jewish condition. On Israeli security, the American president, religious pluralism, and other issues of real consequence, the gap between Israeli and American Jews is very wide.

The historical sources of this divide are illuminated in Rick Richman’s eye-opening Racing Against History: The 1940 Campaign for a Jewish Army to Fight Hitler. . . . [T]he reasons for the failure [to raise such an army] show us that disagreements between American Jews and Israel are not new, and they are not the result of Prime Minister Netanyahu or any American president. . . .

Richman . . . demonstrates that [Chaim] Weizmann’s reflections on 1940 are consistent with assessments of the American Diaspora he had been making for decades. As early as 1916, Weizmann had written that assimilation was “the natural progress of emancipated Jews” outside of the land of Israel. In America, he found that assimilationist pressure had led Jews to adopt the same isolationist views as their non-Jewish neighbors. American Jews believed that they were already in the promised land, and they would not let European strangers or Middle Eastern dreamers endanger their standing. . . .

Richman’s book reveals how three singular Zionist leaders came to America, each with his distinct habits of mind and ways of negotiating the country, its politics, and its people. Despite their apparent disagreements, they all stood for Jewish particularity and Jewish strength as the keys to the Jewish future. But in America, the Jewish future would not be decided by Jewish strength or understood in the name of Jewish particularity. The differences between Jewish Americans and Zionists predate Israel’s founding. They predate World War II. Richman’s remarkable account of a telling moment in history shows how the differences between American Jews and the [ideological] descendants of Weizmann, Jabotinsky, and Ben-Gurion grow straight from the roots of Zionism itself.

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.