Privatized Jewish identity intensified into obsessive self-preoccupation as its public significance faded.

Evidence

The result was that their private lives, their decisions and sentiments, became the very center of their “Jewishness.” And the more the fact of Jewish birth lost its religious, national, and social-economic significance, the more obsessive Jewishness became; Jews were obsessed by it as one may be by a physical defect or advantage, and addicted to it as one may be to a vice. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 265

Categorization

• SEED: Mechanism parallels contemporary identity politics where depoliticized markers grow more obsessively central — an essay angle on privatization producing fixation.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does this conversion mechanism generalize to other minoritized identities under assimilation regimes?