Heart of a Stranger

Angela Buchdahl was born in Korea in 1972, the daughter of a Korean Buddhist mother, Yi Sulja, and a Jewish American father, Fred Warnick. Her memoir traces her path from an immigrant childhood in Tacoma, Washington, to becoming the first Asian American ordained as both cantor and rabbi, and eventually the first woman to serve as senior rabbi of Central Synagogue in Manhattan. The book is structured as part memoir and part spiritual guidebook, with each chapter followed by a brief teaching called a d'var Torah, anchored by a Hebrew word.

Buchdahl opens by framing the historical conditions that made her life possible. Her parents' interracial marriage in 1968 came one year after the Supreme Court's Loving v. Virginia decision legalized interracial marriage nationwide. She was born the same year Sally Priesand became the first woman ordained as a rabbi in America and grew up as the Reform Movement, a branch of liberal Judaism, shifted toward inclusion of interfaith families.

Sulja was born in Japan in 1942, where her Korean family had been forcibly brought during Japan's occupation of Korea. After the war, the family returned to Korea only to be displaced again during the Korean War. Sulja's father died when she was 11; her grandmother raised seven children alone. Sulja studied at a Buddhist temple, scored the highest marks on Korea's national college exam, and became the only one of her siblings to attend college. Buchdahl's father, Fred, was a third-generation Jewish American from Tacoma serving in Korea. They married in 1968 despite the social stigma surrounding Korean women who married American men. Knowing the discrimination biracial children faced, Sulja moved the family to Tacoma in 1977, when Buchdahl neared school age.

The family joined Temple Beth El, the only synagogue within 30 miles, where four generations of Warnicks had been members. Buchdahl's parents chose Judaism for their daughters, not as a renunciation of Sulja's Buddhism but as an embrace of Fred's community. Sulja participated in Hebrew classes and the choir but never converted, occupying a permanent outsider status. She co-founded the Korean Women's Association, which grew into the second-largest social service organization in Washington state.

As a child, Buchdahl developed a deep attachment to Jewish ritual, leading nightly prayer services with her younger sister, Gina, beginning at age eight. A teacher named Ruthie introduced the folk-influenced songs of composer Debbie Friedman at Temple Beth El, electrifying Buchdahl. At Camp Swig, a Reform Jewish camp, she discovered how communal singing created spiritual community. Rabbi Richard Rosenthal, who as a child witnessed Kristallnacht, the 1938 Nazi pogrom, told 12-year-old Buchdahl she should consider becoming a rabbi. Her bat mitzvah deepened her sense of Jewish legacy. During her aliyah, the blessing before and after reading the Torah, she felt the weight of inheritance: Had her parents not raised her as a Jew, 4,000 years of tradition would have ended with her.

At 16, Buchdahl joined the Bronfman Youth Fellowship, a selective summer program in Israel. The director warned her that halacha, or Jewish law, considers a person Jewish only if their mother is Jewish. In Jerusalem, her Orthodox roommate told her directly that according to halacha, she was not Jewish. The devastation strengthened rather than broke her resolve, and months later she told a mentor for the first time that she wanted to become a rabbi. Her mother discouraged the path, citing three strikes: "You're a woman. You are Korean. You have a non-Jewish mother." Three years later, observant classmates at the same program manipulated Gina into leading an invalid Havdalah, the ceremony marking the Sabbath's end, by secretly altering the blessings. The humiliation drove Gina away from practicing Judaism as an adult.

At Yale, Buchdahl led services at Hillel, the campus Jewish center, but felt unable to match her peers' cultural fluency. A research fellowship in Jerusalem brought a crisis: An Orthodox songwriter refused to teach her Torah because she was not Jewish. In a tearful phone call, Buchdahl told her mother she wanted to stop being Jewish. Her mother asked: "Is that really possible, Angela?" The question forced Buchdahl to recognize that her Jewishness was inescapable. Months later, Rabbi Elliot Dorff, a Conservative Jewish scholar, reframed giyur, or Jewish conversion, as an acknowledgment of the Jewish soul already present. She underwent a giyur ceremony in Seattle, immersing in a mikvah, a ritual bath, and affirming before three rabbis that her Jewish soul had been shaped by both parents.

She and Jacob Buchdahl, a classmate from Yale, married after a long courtship. She entered Hebrew Union College in 1995, eventually pursuing both cantorial and rabbinic ordination. The birth of their first child, Gabriel, brought postpartum depression, from which a sisterhood of women rescued her.

After 12 years at Westchester Reform Temple, Buchdahl accepted a position as senior cantor at Central Synagogue. Her early years were marked by congregant resistance and performance anxiety, but she gradually built a distinctive musical identity. When Senior Rabbi Peter Rubinstein announced his retirement, Buchdahl pursued the position despite questions about whether a mother could handle the role and whether Central should be led by an "Ashkenazi rabbi," a term for Jews of European descent. The congregation voted overwhelmingly in her favor.

Her senior rabbinate brought institutional triumphs and profound challenges. She led services at the 2013 Reform Biennial before 6,000 people, honoring her mother from the stage. The #MeToo movement compelled her to address the legacy of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, a beloved composer accused of sexually molesting women and girls; Central took a one-year moratorium on his music. The Covid-19 pandemic forced her to reinvent congregational life virtually, and daily meditation calls drew over 400 participants. Following George Floyd's murder in 2020, she delivered a viral sermon arguing that Jewish peoplehood is covenantal rather than racial.

In January 2022, Buchdahl was drawn into the Colleyville, Texas, synagogue hostage crisis when the gunman called her, demanding she use her connections to secure a prisoner's release. She lied to buy time while the FBI intervened, and the hostages were freed that night. The Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, plunged her into grief. She traveled to Israel on a clergy mission, witnessing the memorial for Kibbutz Be'eri's 108 murdered members and hearing survivors' testimonies. In 2024, Seoul National University invited her to keynote the inauguration of Korea's first Israel Education Research Center, where she sang a mash-up of Israeli and Korean songs as the audience rose to its feet.

The memoir closes with a pilgrimage to Korea for Sulja's 80th birthday. Three generations of women visited Donghwasa Temple, a Buddhist monastery where Sulja once studied. The Buddhist teacher asked Buchdahl to explain Judaism, and she told the story of Abraham, commanded to leave home and become a stranger, recognizing she was also telling her mother's story. At the ancestral burial plot, Buchdahl and her daughter Rose recited the Jewish Kaddish, a memorial prayer, for their Korean ancestors. The book's final image is a box from Sulja: the first harvest of persimmons, pears, and apples from a family orchard planted in Tacoma, fruit born of patience, faith, and a love that bridged two worlds.