Rabbi Angela Buchdahl’s spiritual memoir, Heart of a Stranger: An Unlikely Rabbi’s Story of Faith, Identity, and Belonging (2025), chronicles her journey as the daughter of a Korean Buddhist mother and a Jewish American father who became the first Asian American to be ordained as both a cantor (or worship leader) and a rabbi. The book traces her path from a childhood in Tacoma, Washington, where she navigated her intersecting identities, to her leadership of Central Synagogue in Manhattan, New York, one of North America’s largest and most prominent Reform congregations. Structured as part narrative and part spiritual guide, the memoir pairs chapters of personal history with short theological teachings, or d’var Torah, that connect her lived experiences to the wisdom of ancient Jewish texts. The memoir examines themes such as Outsider-Hood as a Path to Belonging, Covenant Over Bloodlines Defining Identity, and Women Redefining Sacred Authority.

Buchdahl is a significant public figure in American religious life and a spiritual counsel to political leaders, known for her interfaith dialogue. Her story is set against the backdrop of major shifts in American Judaism, including the Reform movement’s 1983 acceptance of patrilineal descent and the ongoing challenges for women seeking senior leadership roles. In 2014, Buchdahl became the first woman to be named Senior Rabbi in Central Synagogue’s 175-year history. Her memoir uses her personal story of navigating racism and religious gatekeeping to advocate for an inclusive vision of Jewish community.

This guide refers to the 2025 Pamela Dorman Books/Viking edition.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of illness, death, child death, graphic violence, sexual violence, child sexual abuse, child abuse, racism, religious discrimination, gender discrimination, mental illness, and substance use.

Summary

Angela Buchdahl, the first Asian American to be ordained as both a cantor (worship leader) and a rabbi in the United States, recounts her path from a biracial childhood in Washington to leading Central Synagogue in New York. Part narrative memoir and part spiritual guidebook, the book traces how Buchdahl’s intersecting identities as a Korean, Jewish, and American woman shaped her faith, career, and understanding of belonging. This summary uses a chronological structure to convey Buchdahl’s story.

Buchdahl was born in 1972 in South Korea to Fred Warnick, a Jewish American from Tacoma, Washington, and Yi Sulja, a Korean Buddhist. Her parents married in 1968, one year after the US Supreme Court’s decision in Loving v. Virginia legalized interracial marriage nationwide. Sulja’s early life was marked by repeated displacement: Born in Japan during the Japanese occupation of Korea, she grew up in a family forcibly taken from their homeland, returned to Korea after World War II, and was uprooted again by the Korean War. Her father was a resistance fighter from the elite yangban scholarly class. After his death when Sulja was 11, her mother, Gae-ran, was left to raise seven children alone. Sulja was intellectually ambitious and moved into a Buddhist temple at 20 to study for the national college entrance exam. She scored the highest marks and became the only one of her siblings to attend college.

Fred came from a third-generation Jewish family in Tacoma whose ancestors had built a prosperous millwork business. After family turmoil and his parents’ divorce, he enrolled in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps and was stationed in Korea, where he met Sulja at an English conversation group. Despite vast cultural differences, they fell in love. Interracial unions in 1960s Korea carried severe stigma, and biracial children faced brutal discrimination. Knowing this, Sulja decided to leave Korea before her daughters started school, and the family arrived in Tacoma in 1977.

After relocating to Washington, Buchdahl’s parents joined Temple Beth El, the only synagogue for 30 miles, where four generations of Warnicks had bar mitzvahs. Buchdahl’s parents chose Judaism for their daughters as an embrace of the Warnick family and its community. Fred insisted that there was no such thing as half-Jewish. Sulja participated in synagogue life but never converted, viewing Judaism as inseparable from ethnicity. Buchdahl sensed that the congregation treated her mother as a permanent guest, planting an early awareness that Jews might welcome strangers while keeping them at arm’s length. Meanwhile, Sulja devoted herself to welcoming Korean immigrants to Tacoma, co-founding the Korean Women’s Association, which grew into Washington State’s second-largest social-service organization.

From a young age, Buchdahl gravitated toward Jewish practice with unusual intensity. At age eight, she began leading nightly bedtime prayers with her younger sister, Gina. At 10, a music teacher named Ruthie introduced her to the songs of Debbie Friedman, a groundbreaking Jewish folk composer, igniting a passion for Jewish music that would define her career. She took up guitar and became a song leader at Camp Swig, a Reform Jewish summer camp in California. Her bat mitzvah at 13 deepened her sense of Jewish inheritance; she felt the community lifting her and left feeling firmly tethered to a legacy that no one could take away.

At 16, Buchdahl was accepted into the Bronfman Youth Fellowship, a selective summer program in Israel. Her Orthodox roommate told her that according to traditional Jewish law, which traces identity through the mother, Buchdahl was not a Jew. The assertion devastated Buchdahl, yet her immersive study of Jewish texts strengthened her resolve. Three months later, during a follow-up gathering in New York, she told Rabbi Michael Paley that she wanted to become a rabbi, the first time she spoke the words aloud. Her mother warned her of the odds against her, including her gender, her Korean background, and her mother’s non-Jewish heritage.

A senior-year fellowship in Jerusalem pushed Buchdahl to a crisis point when repeated encounters with people who denied her Jewish legitimacy left her wanting to abandon Judaism altogether. Despite her mother’s earlier fears, she reminded Buchdahl that it wouldn’t be so easy to let go of her faith. Her words forced Buchdahl to recognize her Judaism as inescapable. Months later, encouraged by Conservative Rabbi Elliot Dorff’s reframing of Jewish giyur (conversion) as an embrace of a Jewish soul already present, Buchdahl immersed in the mikvah (a ritual bath) in a reaffirmation ceremony in Seattle.

Not long later, Buchdahl enrolled at Hebrew Union College for rabbinical studies and then pivoted to cantorial school on the New York campus to be near Jacob Buchdahl, a fellow Yale classmate whom she later married at Temple Beth El. Despite a humbling start, Cantor Benjie Ellen Schiller encouraged her. Buchdahl decided to pursue dual ordination as both cantor and rabbi, becoming the first Asian American ordained in each role.

After 12 years at Westchester Reform Temple in Scarsdale under the mentorship of Senior Rabbi Rick Jacobs, Buchdahl accepted a position at Central Synagogue in Manhattan. She built a new musical identity for the congregation, blending ancient melodies with contemporary compositions. When Senior Rabbi Peter Rubinstein announced his retirement in 2013, Buchdahl entered the search process to succeed him despite doubts from multiple directions: Rabbi Rubinstein questioned whether she could manage the job with young children; a powerful congregant said that the synagogue should be led by an Ashkenazi, or European-descended, rabbi; and women of various ages expressed skepticism. After an eight-month search, Buchdahl was elected Central’s senior rabbi and the first woman to hold the title in the synagogue’s 175-year history.

The years that followed brought crises that tested Buchdahl’s faith and public voice. After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, Buchdahl delivered a Yom Kippur sermon arguing that the notion of Judaism as a race is a construct created by oppressors, a speech that went viral and resonated with Jews of color across the country. The COVID-19 pandemic forced Central to pivot to virtual worship and compelled Buchdahl to launch a daily meditation practice that drew over 400 participants. In January 2022, a gunman holding hostages at a Texas synagogue called Buchdahl directly, demanding that she use her “Jewish influence” to free a convicted terrorist. The hostages eventually escaped when the rabbi threw a chair and told everyone to run. After the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, Buchdahl traveled to Israel on a clergy mission and wrestled publicly with the war’s moral complexities, arriving at an answer that she had scarcely spoken since the attack: the need to work toward peace.

In June 2024, Buchdahl delivered the keynote at Seoul National University’s inauguration of the first Israel Education Research Center in Korea, her first trip to her birthplace in her role as a rabbi. She identified deep parallels between Israel and Korea, two cultures that established modern states within months of each other in 1948. She closed by singing a mash-up of Israeli and Korean anthems.

The memoir’s final chapters follow Buchdahl back to Korea for her mother’s 80th birthday. Three generations of women—Buchdahl, Sulja, and Buchdahl’s daughter, Rose—undertook a meditation retreat at the Buddhist temple where Sulja once studied. At the family’s ancestral burial site, Buchdahl and Rose recited the Jewish Kaddish, the memorial prayer, for their Korean grandparents.

The book closes with Buchdahl’s return to Tacoma for her parents’ 50th wedding anniversary, where Fred and Sulja revealed a family orchard of 18 saplings, the numerical value of the Hebrew word Chai, meaning “life.” Years later, Buchdahl received a box from her mother containing the first harvest from her children’s trees, which she describes as a taste of paradise born from decades of faith, patience, and boundary-crossing love.