I recently saw an interview with Natan Sharansky who was a Soviet dissident who spent many years in Soviet jails fighting to be allowed to immigrate to Israel.

I recently saw an interview with Natan Sharansky who was a Soviet dissident who spent many years in Soviet jails fighting to be allowed to immigrate to Israel. His take on Jewishness at least in context of USSR was that Jews were completely assimilated and only the antisemites defined them as such and hated them and that's all. I think jews in Nazi germany as well suddenly found themselves jewish by the Nazi genocidal ideology while before it was complete assimilation with the German culture.