Adorno argued that Jewish name retention rationalizes easier persecution.

Evidence

Many years later, Adorno defended his name change indirectly in a memorandum he wrote for the Institut’s project on antiSemitism in labor. “The idea that the Jews should show more pride by sticking to their names is but a thin rationalization of the desire that they should come into the open so that one might recognize and persecute them the more easily” (November 3, 1944, memorandum in Paul Lazarsfeld’s possession). — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 984

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A compact, unsettling inversion: a demand for Jewish pride in keeping names amounts to facilitating identification for persecution. Dense enough to sit with.
• XREF: Connects to Frankfurt School analyses of Jewish identity and antisemitism, and to the later question of assimilation versus self-assertion in the Dialectic of Enlightenment.