God makes sure that Jews can’t forget being Jewish by making sure they are out of step with a culture that would otherwise absorb them.
The more religious, the more conservative because being religious is the acknowledgment of forever not belonging to the broader culture
Honestly, secular Jews embrace being ‘apart’ from the rest of society as much or more than many religious Jews, and this is not a universally good thing. There are no ‘chosen people’. There are just people, equal under God. This is what the Founder's thought, as stated in the Declaration of Independence (”We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”).
In terms of literal interpretation of the Bible, or the Talmud, or the Torah, Bareishit/Genesis tells us of ‘the beginning’, and of Adam and Eve, and forms the basis of the concept that we are all descendants of Adam and Eve - thus all related by our ancestry.
This is a longer discussion than we can have on a thread, and I have a partial Jewish heritage, but in my view, what makes people what they are is a combination of many, many factors, and the nurturing of your family, and the values they instill, have enormous effects. It's not just the ‘seed’. It's the soil on which it falls.