A Jewish Korean Princess Rabbi

GLENN ALTSCHULE writes about the daughter of Fred Warnick, a Jewish American, and Yi Sulija, a Korean Buddhist. Angela Buchdahl, who was the first Asian American ordained as a rabbi in North America, and is the senior rabbi at Central Synagogue in New York City, a Reform congregation and one of the largest Jewish houses of worship in the world. The reviewer is the Litwin Emeritus Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.

In her book Heart of a Stranger, Buchdahl tells the story of her life. Born in Korea, Buchdahl she arrived in Tacoma, Washington, with her parents and her sister in 1977 at the age of five. The family had chose Judaism for their girls because Sulija believed that membership in Temple Beth El would connect them to their father’s extended family and the larger Jewish community.

Sulija took Hebrew classes, sang in the synagogue choir, and prepared wontons for Shabbat. She didn’t convert to Judaism because members of the congregation, though friendly, “never quite treated her as one of them.”

Buchdahl viewed herself as a “spiritual mutt.” At her bat mitzvah, she vowed to protect and pass on her religious inheritance. Painfully aware that, apart from inside “a Reform bubble,” most Jews use matrilineal descent to establish Jewish identity, Buchdahl initially rejected conversion as an insult to someone who had been a Jew for her entire life.

While an undergraduate at Yale University, however, she embraced giyur (conversion) as an acknowledgment of the Judaism that had always been inside her. To become a Jew in the eyes of most Orthodox Jews, she agreed as well to seek the approval of a beit din (a Jewish court of law) and immerse herself in a mikveh (ritual bath).

In 1999, Buchdahl was ordained as a cantor by the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, and as a rabbi in 2001. She took a position as assistant rabbi and cantor in the Westchester Reform Temple in 2003, married Jacob Buchdahl in 2005, and moved to Central Synagogue in 2006. In the ensuing years, she felt guilty about not connecting her children to their Korean heritage or to the large Korean community in New York City.

That changed in 2012, after Buchdahl appeared on the PBS television program Finding Your Roots, hosted by Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Gates provided information about Buchdahl’s ancestors in Romania, the ship that took them to Ellis Island in 1902, and the antisemitism that had prompted them to leave their homeland. But the “big reveal” came when Gates traced her maternal line back to King Sejong the Great. “The rumor is true,” Buchdahl joked to her mother. “I’m a Jewish Korean princess.”

Heart of a Stranger supplements Rabbi Buchdahl ’s personal story with general observations about identity politics. After noting that seven million American Jews are not white, Buchdahl recommends rethinking “tribal racial notions of Jewish peoplehood.” Rabbi Buchdahl also relates her own experiences with sexism. Congregants she reveals, wondered aloud whether she could handle the job at Central Synagogue while raising three children.

Rabbi Buchdahl’s homilies contain kernels of wisdom on a wide array of subjects. Often translated as “faith,” the Hebrew word emunah she suggests, is better understood as “trust.” More than faith, a noun, something you can have, trust, a verb, is put into practice by Abraham when he leaves his home, counts the stars (to learn how many offspring he will have), and brings his son Isaac to the mountain.

The Kabbala, she reveals, offers an alternative to the standard creation narrative. Because God is everywhere, He contracts, creates darkness, and pours light into 10 vessels, which shatter in response to the primordial energy.

Rabbi Buchdahl points out that God created human beings to “gather the sparks.” Our task, then, is to realize that brokenness, not perfection, is our inheritance. That’s why the shofar (Ram’s) call shvarim means “breaks.” And perhaps why the Yiddish word krechtz, “a sigh, groan, or plaintive plea,” is a quintessential Jewish expression of sorrow and the capacity to survive it.

Heart of a Stranger concludes with a dramatically different expression: anguish at the Oct. 7 mega-attack by Hamas terrorists and its aftermath.

Rabbi Buchdahl cried “over lost lives, children held captive, young soldiers risking their lives to defend their country.” The conflict, she writes, “reduced all nuance to rubble” amid an alarming absence of listening and compassion.

“I don’t have God’s power to see. Or to know,” she told members of her congregation. But when asked what God would want her to do, she knew the answer: Work toward peace, even if doing so seems “unwise, unschooled, naive.” But this is when faith comes in.

“Not a blind faith but trusting in an outcome for which there is no alternative, taking even the smallest steps to bring it about and not losing hope that it is still within reach.”

In a small step to that end, Buchdahl flew to Korea in the summer of 2024 to mark the opening at the Seoul National University of the nation’s first Israel Education Center. She ended her remarks by singing “Yerushalayim Shel Zahav” and “Arirang,” a Korean folk tune: songs of “resilience against all probability, each the requiem of a buffeted people, ringing out into the hall – and, just maybe, into a gentler new day.”

I would add: The Qur’an refers to Prophet Abraham as a community or a nation: “Abraham was a nation/community [Ummah]; dutiful to God, a monotheist [hanif], not one of the polytheists.” (16:120) If Prophet Abraham is an Ummah; then fighting between the descendants of Prophets Ishmael and Isaac is a civil war and should always be avoided. And prior to the 20th century Arabs and Jews did make war with each other. “Lo yisa goy el goy kherev velo yilmedu od milkhama” “Nation shall not lift sword against nation, nor learn war anymore. (Isaiah 2:4)

If all Arabs and Jews can live up to the ideal that ‘the descendants of Abraham’s sons should never make war against each other’ is the will of God; we will help fulfill the 2700 year old vision of Prophet Isaiah: “On that day there will be a highway from Egypt to Assyria. The Assyrians will go to Egypt, and the Egyptians to Assyria. The Egyptians and Assyrians will worship together. On that day Israel  will join a three-party alliance with Egypt and Assyria, a blessing upon the heart. The LORD of Hosts will bless them saying, “Blessed be Egypt My people, Assyria My handiwork, and Israel My inheritance.” (Isaiah 19:23-5)

There will be no peace until both Palestinians and Israelis declare the chant ‘From the river to the sea’ becomes an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence, and not death, destruction, or hate. We can make it truly aspirational by making it focus on both peoples first, and the land second. “From the river to the sea Palestinians and Israelis should be freed of hatred and suffering by ‘two independent states for two peoples, sharing the land peacefully’ solution.’”