Rabbi Ethan Tucker at the recent ELI Talks in New York City:

“Anyone who accepts the notion that you can convert into Judaism has somewhat, to some degree, abandoned the idea that Judaism is about ethnicity alone…  But perhaps more striking is that for all of the infighting in the Jewish community regarding who is a Jew, I am not yet aware of anyone in any denomination or community or framework who disputes the idea that someone born to two Jews is assumed to be a Jew, [even though] birth alone tells you nothing about a person’s religion or about their commitments. Given that we live in a world where both of those assumptions hold, you can see that we don’t live in a world that in fact [fully] separates these two categories [of ethnicity and religion].”