Is reed a Jewish last name?

Answer 1

Lou Reed is Jewish

Answer 2

Most people with the last name "Reed" are Christian or Agnostic/Atheist, but there are some Jews with the last name Reed.

There are very few actually "Jewish" last names where you can be reasonably certain the person having that name is Jewish (one such being Cohen/Cohan, which comes from a Hebrew word meaning "priest"), because "last names" are mostly an invention of relatively recent times and Jews have historically tended to take last names from the culture in which they found themselves living when the whole "last name" thing got started. Most last names that are thought of as "Jewish" in the US are really German names (and wouldn't be thought of as especially "Jewish" in Germany or Austria), because a lot of German Jews immigrated to the US to escape persecution. A lot of Polish Jews did too, but we normally don't think of Polish last names as being terribly Jewish: a lot of non-Jewish Poles also immigrated to the US, which "dilutes" the perceived Jewishness of Polish names. Most non-Jewish Germans who immigrated to the US did it early enough in US history that their names have a) been Anglicized (Schmidt to Smith, Klein to Kline or Cline) or b) have been around so long they're not thought of as being particularly "ethnic" anymore (Lang, Weber, Keller).

One thing that makes it even trickier is that last names are usually passed down from the father's side, but "Jewishness" is, by Jewish custom, passed down through the mother. If your mother was Jewish, you're Jewish. If your father was Jewish and your mother wasn't, as far as Orthodox Jews are concerned you're a Gentile unless you explicitly convert to Judaism. So even some Cohens are not "Jewish".