It might seem unthinkable today, but what would happen if another global pandemic occurred? After all, there's no guarantee that the Covid-19 outbreak will be the only such event in our lifetimes. So what have we learned? Will we be able to respond more effectively in the future?

The answers to these questions are not at all clear. In a time of deep division, most everyone agrees that the pandemic revealed a host of weaknesses in American society and in our public-health establishment's ability to handle deadly contagions. Yet the failures of 2020, 2021, and now 2022 provide some useful lessons.

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"My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over." Gerald Ford delivered the famous line upon taking the oath of office after the resignation of President Richard Nixon. The "internal wounds of Watergate" were "more painful and more poisonous than those of foreign wars," Ford said. Now was a time to heal.

Whether or not the "nightmare" itself was over, the end of the Nixon presidency was only the beginning of the long-term effects of the scandal, which would change the institution of the presidency itself and intrude on nearly every successor. Fifty years later, the ghost of Watergate appears to be the White House's one permanent resident.

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On Shavuot, which begins Saturday evening, June 4, Jews around the world will read the Book of Ruth in synagogue. The biblical tale, situated in the pre-monarchical period in ancient Israel, tells the story of its eponymous heroine, a Moabite who marries into an Israelite family that moved to Moab in a time of political turmoil and famine. As Americans deal with their own political, financial, and geopolitical turmoil today, Ruth's four brief chapters offer a profound example of how ancient models of humility, kindness, and hospitality can both reveal the greatness of our own nation and inspire a renewed will to overcome our current internecine conflicts.

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Germany is now known as the site of the most horrific anti-Semitic slaughter in history, the Holocaust. But well before Hitler's rise, as Michael Brenner shows in his new book, In Hitler's Munich, there was a long history of Jewish communal life in Germany, as well as a long history of anti-Semitism. There was even a Jewish premier of Bavaria in the years after World War I, the journalist and revolutionary Kurt Eisner. Eisner was assassinated by an anti-Semite, Count Anton Graf von Arco auf Valley. Arco-Valley, as he is more commonly known, had Jewish ancestry—a reminder of the complicated nature of German-Jewish relationships even before the rise of Nazism.

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A skilled writer, editor, and political activist, Midge Decter was a key figure in the movement of neoconservative, anti-Communist liberals away from the Democratic Party in the 1970s and 1980s.

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