How do you define 'Jew'?

Who Is a Jew? Court Ruling in Britain Raises Question

The basic test in Judaism for who is Jewish isn't what you believe, or what you practice--it's whether your mother is Jewish. This is a long-standing practice, but the different denominations of Judaism (yes, there are, for those who didn't know) approach the question differently. So then you get into the question of 'how Jewish is the mother?' At the heart of this matter is can an Orthodox school exclude a child because the mother, who is a convert to Judaism, converted in a more liberal synagogue than the school recognises, a matter that in the United States, would probably fall into the area of a private decision by a religious school, but in Britain becomes an issue because it, like many other religious schools, receive public funding. The parents who sued lost the first round, but an appellate court ruled that the child was not being excluded on religious grounds (as in practice) but rather on ethnic grounds (his mother's non-Jewish ethnicity). It will no doubt go up the chain.

It's an interesting question. Religions are entitled to their beliefs, but throw the public funding issue in and it becomes more complicated.

But here's the thing--unlike Christianity, Judaism isn't based on belief, but rather observation of laws, as well as ethnic identity. So you can't define an admissions policy based on beliefs, and ethnicity is out in this case. So it would have to be practice. There are lots of Jews, however, who would argue that eating a ham sandwich doesn't make you less Jewish. And as the article states, you have to be creative about figuring out which children went to synagogue given that Orthodox and Conservative Jews don't write on the Sabbath. So the whole thing opens a can of worms involving the British government, the school, and the various denominations and its leaders all trying to find some correct meaning for the word 'Jew'. It's making people question the very meaning of Jewishness, and who has the right to determine it. As a liberal rabbi put it, 'The Orthodox definition of Jewish excludes 40 percent of the Jewish community in this country.' Who has the right to exclude? How inclusive can you be without making the label meaningless?

I will say one thing; part of the point of education is to get people to think about these sorts of issues, so in a way the school is fulfilling its mission--but not like it expected to.