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A 1909 postcard depicting Jewish immigration from Russia to the U.S. The history of U.S. Jews and the history of Jews in Palestine developed in parallel. Merging them to criticize the State of Israel is an anachronism. Credit: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

Jews in America sit in a fragile place within the country's racial order, where partial acceptance into whiteness has brought both privilege and a sense of alienation. As tensions around race and the unresolved legacy of slavery continue to shape life in the U.S., Jews are increasingly pulled into these fault lines and are becoming a stand-in for wider societal discontent

Two year ago, The Atlantic's Franklin Foer published "The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending," a cover article in which he argued that an "unprecedented period of safety, prosperity and political influence" for Jews in the United States was coming to an end. Foer suggested this Golden Age might be ending not just for Jews, but also "for the country that nurtured them." Foer warned readers that forsaking the Jews in your country often means the end of your society as you know it, and while he admitted it is "hardly an iron law of history," there was an air of prophecy in this pronouncement with which I largely agree. But it doesn't get to the core of what ultimately accounts for America's Jewish problem – the complicated and fraught history of racial passing in the United States.