[Shoshana]

Your questions about "who is Jewish" were addressed in both mine and spaypets posts above...

re Jewish & race. This is WAY beyond my area of expertise (I am neither a geneticist nor an anthropologist) but this is my understanding.

Jews are not a race. Jews belong to various ethnic and cultural groups, but not to a specific race. Many Jews are white (which includes peoples of northern & eastern european origins and middle eastern origins,) some are Black (African origins), others are Hispanic (though Hispanic is not always considered a race indistinguishable from white or Black), and some are Asian. As an aside, Caucasian only refers to a small subset of the white race -- those whose origins are in the Caucasus mountain regions of Russia.

The idea that race can be determined by viewing/examining an individual's appearance is outdated and is not born out by genetics. There is MORE variation WITHIN a race, than across races. Most scientists today view race primarily as a political and social construct, not a genetic one. My guess is that your friends were confusing ethnicity with race -- many people do.

Re your agency -- sorry, I can't speak to whether a Jewish birth birth mother would choose you). It's my hunch that it would be difficult for Christian adoptive parents to raise a child born to a Jewish mother as a Christian but still maintain --active-- ties to the Jewish heritage.