Most people with the last name "Reed" are Christian orAgnostic/Atheist, but there are some Jews with the last nameReed.There are very few actually "Jewish" last names where you can bereasonably certain the person having that name is Jewish (one suchbeing Cohen/Cohan, which comes from a Hebrew word meaning"priest"), because "last names" are mostly an invention ofrelatively recent times and Jews have historically tended to takelast names from the culture in which they found themselves livingwhen the whole "last name" thing got started. Most last names thatare thought of as "Jewish" in the US are really German names (andwouldn't be thought of as especially "Jewish" in Germany orAustria), because a lot of German Jews immigrated to the US toescape persecution. A lot of Polish Jews did too, but we normallydon't think of Polish last names as being terribly Jewish: a lot ofnon-Jewish Poles also immigrated to the US, which "dilutes" theperceived Jewishness of Polish names. Most non-Jewish Germans whoimmigrated to the US did it early enough in US history that theirnames have a) been Anglicized (Schmidt to Smith, Klein to Kline orCline) or b) have been around so long they're not thought of asbeing particularly "ethnic" anymore (Lang, Weber, Keller).One thing that makes it even trickier is that last names areusually passed down from the father's side, but "Jewishness" is, byJewish custom, passed down through the mother. If your mother wasJewish, you're Jewish. If your father was Jewish and your motherwasn't, as far as Orthodox Jews are concerned you're a Gentileunless you explicitly convert to Judaism. So even some Cohens arenot "Jewish".