In MHO, a very good Post BeauJangles, and being somewhat of the category of being
Half Jewish myself, it squares with my understanding of the whole matter.
But of course the somewhat strange thing is the last part of wanting to convert to Judaism. To some extent it explains, why, of the three similar sister religions of Judaism, Christianity , and Muslim, Judaism is the lone exception for being a non-evangelistic religion that does not actively seeks converts. And the box score today is, world wide, some 14 million Jews, 1.2-1.4 billion Muslims, and well over 2 Billion Christians are alive in the world today. Even if we could go back in time, and add back the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust, it still only gets us up to 20 million Jews. In short, Judaism is less than 2% the size of its second place competitor.
And I somewhat wonder, is it a matter of no one in their right mind would want to become a Jew, or is it a matter that Jews place artificially high barriers that deter others from Converting?
But that conversion barrier is now a ticking time bomb for Israel now, because the Arabs Muslims with Israeli citizen rights are reproducing at a far faster rate than the nominally Jewish in Israel. By my rough math, Muslims are already some 27 percent of the Israeli population, by what will that figure be in 20 Years. Already settler parties are talking about expelling Israeli Muslims as the Orthodox Jews demand new powers to further restrict and narrow the definition of who can be a Jew.