JCO Book Club

When a teenage Angela Buchdahl told her mother she wanted to be a rabbi, her mother counted out the obstacles: she was a woman, she was Korean, her mother was not Jewish. Why choose that fight? Heart of a Stranger is Buchdahl's answer. The daughter of a Korean Buddhist mother and a Jewish American father, she became the first Asian American ordained as a cantor and a rabbi, and today leads New York's Central Synagogue. Her memoir braids that unlikely path with brief reflections on Torah and Jewish values, so each chapter of her life opens out into a teaching. The title comes from the charge to know the heart of the stranger, for we were strangers in the land of Egypt, and that is ultimately the book's subject too: how the experience of feeling like an outsider can become a source of empathy and welcome.

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