You're talking about how things are now. I'm talking about how they became that way over centuries. I recommend reading historical books and studies on Jewish history and identity from multiple perspectives. I have found it to be extremely fascinating.
E.g. here's one perspective:
Love, Hate, and Jewish IdentityJonathan Sacks
On its face, the subject of Judaism and Jewish identity should not count for much in the world. There are worldwide some 1.9 billion Christians and 800 million Muslims, as against a mere twelve million Jews. Throughout the Diaspora, Jews are a tiny minority surrounded by large non-Jewish cultures. In the Middle East, Israel is a tiny country surrounded by a vast constellation of Arab states. We are less than a quarter of a percent of the population of the world. In terms of numbers our influence should be minimal.
Yet I dare to say that Jews and Judaism are of interest and even influence in a way that cannot be accounted for in terms of numbers alone. No one put this better than the American writer Milton Himmelfarb, who said: “Each Jew knows how thoroughly ordinary he is; yet taken together we seem caught up in things great and inexplicable. . . . The number of Jews in the world is smaller than a small statistical error in the Chinese census. Yet we remain bigger than our numbers. Big things seem to happen around us and to us.”
Let me begin my account, if not at the beginning of Jewish time, at least at the beginning of modern Jewish time: 1789, the year of the French Revolution and the birth of the modern secular nation-state. On August 26 the French National Assembly issued its Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, with its ringing opening assertion, “All men are born, and remain, free and equal in rights.” The question was: Did that include Jews? Were Jews free? Were they equal? Were they citizens? Were they men?
The questions were real. At the very time of the Declaration anti-Jewish riots broke out in Alsace, the first and ominous indication that the secular nation-state might not end anti-Jewish sentiment, but merely secularize it into a new mode, to be given (in 1879) the name “anti-Semitism.” Later in 1789, speaking in a debate on the eligibility of Jews for citizenship, the Count of Clermont-Tonnerre spelled out in a fateful sentence the terms on which Jews could be included in the new political dispensation. “The Jews,” he said, “should be denied everything as a nation, but granted everything as individuals.” “It is intolerable,” he continued, “that the Jews should become a separate political formation or class within the country. Every one of them must individually become a citizen; if they do not want this, they must inform us and we shall then be compelled to expel them.”
Thus was born what eventually became known as der Judenfrage, the “Jewish question,” whose relatively innocent formulation gave rise, in 1941, to the Endlosung, the Final Solution. The theory and terminology came from Germany. Some of the mythology, specifically the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, came from Russia. But it was in France, a century after the Revolution, that a Viennese journalist, Theodore Herzl, covering the Dreyfus trial, came to the conclusion that there was no future for the Jews in Europe and that the secular nation-state, far from ending anti-Semitism, had in fact given it a new and potentially terrible rebirth; and that there was no future for the Jewish people unless they constructed a nation-state of their own.
I go back to 1789 because contemporary discussions of Jewish life—issues like outmarriage, Jewish continuity, and Israel-Diaspora relations—often seem to me to lack depth because they lack a sense of historical background. And there is an historical reason for this, namely, that the world's two greatest Jewries, Israel and the American Jewish community, are themselves relatively recent phenomena. Until 1840, almost 90 percent of the Jewish world was to be found in Europe. Even more significantly, the Jews who made the journey to America or Israel did so precisely to forget Europe, to break away from its prejudices and disabilities, and to discover, or make, a new life in a new world. The strange contemporary blindness to Jewish history was born in a specific rebellion against Jewish history—a history that could be written in terms of wanderings and expulsions, inquisitions and pogroms, martyrdoms and exclusions, the powerlessness and homelessness of “the wandering Jew.”
It is for this reason that we cannot understand where we are unless we first understand how we came to be here. Israel cannot be understood as simply a secular democratic state on the European model, or American Jewry as a typical version of American pluralism and denominationalism. These are part, but only part, of the Jewish story. The Israeli and American Jewish communities still carry within them the pains and tensions of the European Jewish experience, and even today they are shaped by what they were created to forget.
The modern Jewish experience was characterized by two phenomena. The first is that Jews were, to use John Murray Cuddihy's phrase, “latecomers to modernity.” There was no long pre-history, such as occurred in Christian Europe, of Renaissance, Reformation, the Wars of Religion, and the birth of Enlightenment. Jews were thrust late into a complex set of challenges—the intellectual challenge of Enlightenment, the political challenge of Emancipation, and the social challenge of integration. What Jews believed, how they lived, and how they organized themselves came under sudden and concerted attack—sometimes in the name of progress, sometimes in the form of prejudice—and after centuries of exclusion from the mainstream of European culture they were radically unprepared for it. This alone would have constituted a crisis of massive proportions for the continuity of Jewish faith.
It was, nonetheless, the lesser of two crises. The other, whose significance it is impossible to overstate, was the double bind modernity itself placed on European Jews, giving rise to the phenomenon eventually termed “Jewish self-hatred.” The results were summed up by Max Nordau in his speech to the First Zionist Congress. The “emancipated Jew in Western Europe,” he said, “has abandoned his specifically Jewish character, yet the nations do not accept him as part of their national communities. He flees from his Jewish fellows, because anti-Semitism has taught him, too, to be contemptuous of them, but his Gentile compatriots repulse him as he attempts to associate with them. He has lost his home in the ghetto, yet the land of his birth is denied to him as his home.” Much has changed since those words were spoken a hundred years ago, but we still live with their consequences.
The Enlightenment presented European Jews with a messianic promise and a demonic reality. The promise was a secular and rational order in which anti-Jewish prejudice would be overcome and Jewish civil disabilities abolished. The reality was that the more Jews became like everyone else, the more irrational and absolute became the prejudice against them: they were capitalists, they were communists, they were too provincial and parochial, they were too rootless and cosmopolitan, they kept to themselves, they got everywhere, they were disloyal, they were suspiciously over-loyal. The more assimilated they became, the more anti-Semitism grew.
The history of nineteenth-century Jewry is the tale of a dozen different attempts to find a way out of this trap from which there was no way out. The extreme response was a flight from Jewish identity through outmarriage, conversion to Christianity, or, wherever possible, the declaration that one was religionless. Among those who shrank from the conclusion that Jews could survive only by ceasing to be Jews, there was significant difference between Western and Eastern Europe. The Count of Clermont-Tonnerre had asked Jews to decide whether they were individuals or a nation—in other words, whether Judaism was a private religious confession or whether Jewry was essentially a collective entity, a people. Historically, of course, the answer was both; but the new European nation-state no longer permitted that reply.
In general, the Jews of Western Europe decided in favor of Judaism as religion-without-peoplehood, those of Eastern Europe in favor of Jewry as peoplehood-without-religion. Hence there emerged in the nineteenth century a set of entirely new constructions of Jewish identity: in the West, Reform and Conservative Judaism, in the East, the movements for Jewish culture and even political autonomy in the Pale of Settlement. As these failed in their aims of normalizing Jewish existence, there emerged perhaps the greatest revolution in modern Jewish life, the Zionist movement, less an ideology than a collection of conflicting ideologies, some secular, some religious, some political, some cultural, some attempting to restore ancient traditions, others determined to destroy them completely and build a totally new kind of Jew.
The First Zionist Congress took place in 1897. A century later, we inhabit a Jewish world in which in one sense everything has changed, and in another, nothing has changed. During the twentieth century, some of the most epic events in Jewish history have taken place: the Holocaust, the founding of the State of Israel, and the transfer of Jewish life from Europe to Israel and America. But the divisions in Jewish life today are almost exactly what they were a hundred years ago—between religious and secular, between Orthodoxy and Reform, and between those who see a Jewish future only in Israel and those who see a continuing role for the Diaspora. Between the first and the eighteenth centuries, with very few exceptions, a single Judaism prevailed—the Judaism of the Mishnah and Talmud that today we call Orthodoxy. In the twentieth century, there has been no new Judaism. Even the apparent exception, the Reconstructionism of Mordecai Kaplan, was only a translation into the American context of the earlier ideas of Ahad Ha-am. So the immense diversity of answers to the question “Who and what is a Jew?” all had their origin in a single century and continent: nineteenth-century Europe.
In 1897, Orthodox Jews believed that Reform would disappear: it was only a way-station on the road to total assimilation. Reform Jews believed that Orthodoxy would disappear: it was wholly incongruous with the modern world. Zionists believed the Diaspora would disappear: it was threatened equally by seduction and rape, assimilation and anti-Semitism. The non-Zionists believed that the hope of Jewish nationhood would disappear: the task of reviving an impulse buried for eighteen centuries was simply too great. We now know that every one of these predictions was wrong. Reform Judaism still exists. So does Orthodoxy. The state of Israel has been born. The Diaspora survives. Every option in Jewish life then exists today, and history has not yet delivered its verdict on any of them. The conflicts that, it was believed, would be resolved in the course of time have simply persisted and if anything grown in their intensity.
Source
Here are some more:
Boundaries of Jewish IdentityJewish identity: a social psychological perspectiveThe Other in Jewish Thought and History: Constructions of Jewish Culture and Identity
Topic: What’s a 'Cultural Muslim'?