Determining “Jewishness” in the UK
Andy Dayton, associate web producer
Here’s a fascinating case of modern law meets 5000-year-old religious tradition. At the end of October, the British Supreme Court decided that — in the case of accepting applicants to a Jewish high school — observance, not ethnicity, should be used in determining admissions. From Sarah Lyall’s New York Times write-up on the ruling:
“In an explosive decision, the court concluded that basing school admissions on a classic test of Judaism — whether one’s mother is Jewish — was by definition discriminatory. Whether the rationale was ‘benign or malignant, theological or supremacist,’ the court wrote, ‘makes it no less and no more unlawful.’”
The article refers to the Jewish principle of matrilineal descent, which we recently heard about on SOF Observed. In the post, we included StoryCorps audio of two friends — Sarah Kelman and Joanna Schochet, who says, “We’re both halfies. By the book I don’t count.”
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