Today is the first day of the Jewish New Year. Rosh Hashanah is being celebrated not only by the faithful across the world, but also by the media—in the form of, among other things, informational guides, explainers, and recipe round-ups. These stories, trivial as they may seem, serve a second, important role: They take it for granted that Jewish life is, in a direct and meaningful sense, a crucial component of American life.

It wasn’t always that way. It used to be that anti-Semitism was also one of American life’s standard features. It used to be that the Jewish citizens of the U.S. were considered, if not less than everybody else, then at least simply other. In 1941—a year that found Europe in the throes of war and the American economy gasping for air—Alfred Jay Nock wrote an article for The Atlantic. Its title? “The Jewish Problem in America.”

Nock expressly confined the scope of “the Jewish problem” to American borders. As he did so, he also made apologies for fellow Americans who routinely made comments like, “I tell you, we are going after those people some day, and when we do, we ain’t going to be gentlemanly about it, like Hitler.” Ultimately, Nock acknowledged that “those people,” as Americans, had the same inalienable rights he enjoyed as a virtue of his citizenship. But those people were also, he believed, distant from him, not just in terms of religion, but in terms of culture. They were also, he believed, “other.”