While the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic is now five years in the past, America’s handling of its challenges is still hotly debated. As a rabbi and doctor, Michael Feldstein found himself a source of authority for his fellow Orthodox Jews during that uncertain time. He looks back on the experience in conversation with Aaron Glatt, and touches on the legacy of Anthony Fauci, the anti-vaccination movement within Orthodox communities, and much else:

I started receiving hundreds of emails daily, with personal questions and a tremendous number of inquiries from schools, shuls, camps, and other organizations. I began sending out weekly email updates, and that turned into the COVID-19 Zoom/YouTube program. Every [Saturday night], we would send out new information and present an update. I always started with a d’var Torah [brief sermon], which was followed by any new information about COVID-19, with an attempt to calm people and give them the information they needed in an efficient way.

At the outset, my . . . goal was to try to put together a unified coalition in response to the virus, so that everybody would do the same thing based on the best available scientific knowledge at the time. That knowledge was constantly changing.

Unfortunately, I think there has been somewhat of a degradation of physicians, science, and public health in the eyes of many people in recent years. Some of that might be appropriate. I think the public-health community did not do a stellar job during the COVID pandemic, which was something that we were not as well equipped to handle as we thought. . . . However, that should not diminish the tremendous work that many in the public-health field, and all healthcare workers who put their lives on the line every day, performed during the COVID pandemic that saved many lives.

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.