I'm confused, is there a usage of the word 'kosher' that isn't safe at work? Are you worried that they may think you're Jewish and discriminate against you?
p.s. You may know this, but from the religious POV, you are either Jewish or not, there's no 1/8th Jewish. If your mother was Jewish, you are too, all the way up your family tree. Either that or if you converted. :)
There is no "the religious POV" and for some purposes, it seems practically and morally compelling to use a similar definition to what persecutors of Jews use, rather than a traditional religious one.
To some extent they do, and as I mentioned it's both a matter of practicality and morality. There's obviously a problem with saying that people who are or may be persecuted as part of a group, are excluded from help by that group if they don't belong due to some technical definition.
According to the Wikipedia article on Israel's Law of Return, in 1970, it was extended to people with one Jewish grandparent or married to a Jew.
"There are several explanations for the decision to be so inclusive. One is that as the Nuremberg Laws did not use a halakhic definition in its definition of "Who is a Jew", the Law of Return definition for citizenship eligibility is not halakhic either. Another explanation is the 1968 wave of immigration from Poland, following an antisemitic campaign by the government. These immigrants were very assimilated and had many non-Jewish family members."
As I understand it, the strict definition of Jewish descent is purely. You have to go back around 100-200k years to reach the most recent common matrilineal ancestor, and I'm reasonably confident she was not Jewish.
How many ancestors you have it just a function of how many generations you look back, and with each successive generations it doubles. At some point in the past, the entire world is your ancestor.
p.s. You may know this, but from the religious POV, you are either Jewish or not, there's no 1/8th Jewish. If your mother was Jewish, you are too, all the way up your family tree. Either that or if you converted. :)