If a Jewish man marries a woman brought up in a different faith, and they have a child, would the Reform Jewish community consider their child to be Jewish?

Historically, since the Rabbinic period (post 70 CE), Jewish status was passed down by the mother. This is known as matrilineality. A child of a Jewish mother is Jewish, even if the father is not. Prior to this period, the Bible recognized patrilineal descent, whereby one’s Jewish status was determined by one’s father.

In 1983, the organized Reform Jewish Movement adopted the principal of patrilineal descent. This is a bit of a misnomer. Reform Judaism in the United States considers a child of an interfaith couple to be Jewish if one parent is Jewish and the child is raised as a Jew and receives a Jewish education and celebrates appropriate life cycle events, such as receiving a Hebrew name and becoming bar or bat mitzvah. This also assumes that the child is being raised exclusively as a Jew and not practicing another religion.