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How an ‘unlikely rabbi’ went from Korea to Colbert
Calling herself an “unlikely rabbi,” Angela Buchdahl has been a staple on numerous lists of notable American Jews, including the Forward 50. Born in South Korea in 1972 and raised by a Korean Buddhist mother and an Ashkenazi Jewish father in Tacoma, Washington, she went on to become the first Asian American ordained as a rabbi and first as a cantor. Today, she leads Central Synagogue in New York City, one of the largest and most influential congregations in the country.
Her new memoir, Heart of a Stranger: An Unlikely Rabbi’s Story of Faith, Identity, and Belonging, traces that journey, from the embracing Jewish community she grew up in to finding herself the answer to a Jeopardy question (“What is rabbi?”) — and, even more bizarrely, picking up the phone one day to hear a hostage-taking gunman make demands of her as the “chief rabbi of the United States.” In advance of the book’s release and a launch event hosted by Stephen Colbert, I spoke with her about claiming her place in Jewish life and the responsibility of Jews to always think of the stranger as themselves.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
How did you nab Stephen Colbert for your book launch event — or did he nab you?
His son and my son were college roommates, and I got to know him and his wife, Evie. I learned quickly that this was not only a very funny man and a very good interviewer, but someone who was deeply faithful. He teaches in his church and thinks a lot about faith. I’m very grateful that he said yes.
Your title is Heart of a Stranger. I want to challenge you on that: Haven’t you and I worked for years on representing Jews of color as normative? Are you still feeling like a stranger?
I guess I would argue that you never fully let it go. It’s like someone who says they were chubby as a kid. They’re not chubby anymore, but there’s some way in which they always see themselves as the chubby kid. You carry certain formative identity markers from childhood into your adulthood.
Heart of a Stranger is not an original title. I took it from Torah, which says, “Do not oppress the stranger. You know the heart of a stranger. You were strangers in Egypt.” This is the existential state that Jews are supposed to understand and know. The danger is when we get too comfortable, too powerful, too complacent.
Along those lines, you write about undergoing a conversion, even though your family was Reform, which by the time you were growing up had recognized patrilineal descent. That brought to mind Julius Lester’s conversion, which actually was something of a reversion because his great-grandfather was a German Jew. Lester said that he wasn’t converting to be accepted; he was converting for himself, saying, “I would do it even if no Jew ever accepted me.”
I had a very similar experience. I rejected the idea of converting when it was first suggested to me at age 16. Growing up in Tacoma in a Reform synagogue in my little Jewish bubble, I was accepted without a lot of questions. But I had a lot of existential identity questions: “Was I Jewish enough? Was I authentic enough? Was I learned enough?” And some of the answers were not yes.
I termed it a reaffirmation ceremony rather than conversion, because conversion sounds like turning into something that you weren’t before. I recognized that with a Beit Din of three Reform rabbis, it wasn’t going to change my status one whit for an Orthodox Jew. But it wasn’t for them. It was really a way to ritually mark the journey that I had been on and the acceptance of my identity in a way that felt important to me.
One reason I live in Duluth is I’ve called our little Temple Israel here the warmest shul that I’ve ever found in one of the coldest places on earth. Do you find it true that smaller Jewish communities are more embracing than large ones?
I grew up in a small community that was incredibly embracing of my family, including my mother, and that made a huge difference. I now work at a very large synagogue. I think the big difference is when you’re in a community where not everybody knows each other and they’re encountering people who are strangers. That’s when the inevitable questions come up.
It was disappointing for me after many years of being the senior rabbi of Central to hear from Jews of color who said Central wasn’t as welcoming of them as I thought. It hadn’t solved every problem just by having me as the senior rabbi. That was a painful realization that started a conversation that has shifted the culture at Central.
You write about the synagogue takeover in Colleyville, Texas, in 2022. The perpetrator who held the rabbi and congregants hostage called you while it was going on. He seemed to think that you were the “chief rabbi of the United States.” On the one hand, you’re balancing this misperception of your influence and power. On the other, this was a real situation of life and death.
That was one of the most surreal and destabilizing experiences I’ve ever had as a rabbi. They don’t train you for hostage negotiation in rabbinical school.
This terrorist clearly had done a lot of research. He researched the synagogue, which was the closest synagogue to the federal prison from which he wanted a prisoner released. The FBI went through his computer and saw that he was searching for what he thought was the equivalent of a chief rabbi because he was from England, where there is a chief rabbi. Of course, that doesn’t exist in America. He also mentioned that he saw pictures of me with President Obama at the White House. I think given Central’s name, and the fact that I had been the answer to a Jeopardy question not long before, may have put me higher up on the search algorithm.
It was terrifying because I felt that he very explicitly put the lives of these four people on me. And yet, I felt powerless to do anything. This is a case where I realized the danger of the antisemitic trope that he had imbibed since childhood, that Jews control the government and can make a few phone calls and get anything done. When I said to him, “I don’t think I have as much power as you think I do,” he was like, “Of course you do.” So, yeah, it was a terrifying day. I continue to give thanks that the four who were being held hostage survived.
Another weird note is that he seemed to think it normative that a Jew of color would be the chief rabbi of the United States. Does this mean our efforts for a more inclusive representation of Judaism are paying off?
It is funny because when I was named senior rabbi of Central, there was an Orthodox publication that had a headline like, “It’s official: Non-Jews can be rabbis” — literally calling me a non-Jew. And here was this deranged gunman who seemed to think I was the chief rabbi. I can laugh about it in some ways now that it’s over, but it is ironic.
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I helped sell Obama’s Iran deal. Its critics owe us all an explanation.
(JTA) — Neoconservatives have some ‘splainin’ to do, as Lucy’s television husband, Ricky Ricardo used to say.
The war on Iran has turned out to be a debacle of historic proportions.
After months of military escalation, tens of billions of dollars expended, critical weapons stockpiles depleted, and a region once again thrown into crisis, the United States now finds itself humiliated. The memorandum of understanding reportedly concluded last week does not represent the culmination of victory. It represents the codification of failure.
Many understood that nuclear disarmament and regime change in Iran could not be achieved through force. As I wrote in these pages a few months ago, more than a decade ago, we reached a solution designed to avert precisely the calamity that has unfolded. It was the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or, in layman’s parlance, the Iran nuclear deal.
As a certified denizen of the Swamp — I served in the Clinton White House’s communications shop and later founded a Washington, DC strategic communications firm — I was at the forefront of selling the Obama administration’s agreement to the American public.
I remember those days well — and I do not miss them.
JCPOA defenders, particularly those of us in the Jewish community, were attacked in the ugliest terms imaginable. We were called appeasers, sellouts, self-hating Jews and worse. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu traveled to Washington and outrageously warned Congress that the deal might pave the way to a second Holocaust.
JCPOA advocates never argued that the agreement signed in Vienna was perfect.
Its critics pointed to the sunset provisions. They objected that the deal did not address every malign activity undertaken by the Islamic Republic throughout the Middle East. These were legitimate concerns. Politics, however, is the art of the possible; geopolitics doubly so.
That agreement nevertheless achieved something extraordinary. Iran shipped out the overwhelming majority of its enriched uranium. International inspectors gained unprecedented access. A mechanism existed to monitor and constrain Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. The prospect of military confrontation receded.
The regime’s hardliners hated the agreement. The Revolutionary Guard fought it tooth and nail. Integration into the global economy threatened entrenched interests within the Islamic Republic. A growing middle class and increasing international engagement carried risks for those whose power depended on its isolation and perpetual confrontation.
Unfortunately, hardliners were not confined to Tehran.
The maximal-pressure advocates in Washington ultimately prevailed. During the first Trump administration, the United States withdrew from the agreement. Tore it up, as the president bragged. Despite the best efforts of our European partners, who had also signed the accord, the framework collapsed beneath the weight of renewed sanctions and diplomatic abandonment.
What followed, we were promised, was supposed to vindicate the critics.
Instead, it vindicated the critics’ critics.
The maximal-pressure advocates have spent years moving the goalposts. First, we were told, sanctions would bring the regime to its knees. They did not. Then economic isolation would force Tehran to abandon its nuclear ambitions. It did not. Then military pressure would succeed where sanctions had failed. It did not. Then leadership decapitation, covert action, and military escalation would produce regime change. They did not.
Each promised but failed breakthrough gave way to another promised breakthrough.
And now comes the final indignity: the so-called memorandum of understanding.
After years of threats, sanctions, covert action, military escalation and open warfare, the United States has agreed to resume negotiations with the very regime it set out to break. The Islamic Republic remains in power. Its leadership and political system remain intact.
Nor is that all.
The agreement reportedly provides waivers for Iranian oil exports and opens the door to sanctions relief and renewed access to many billions in frozen assets. It establishes yet another negotiating process on the nuclear question rather than resolving it. It leaves unresolved many of the issues that maximal-pressure advocates once described as non-negotiable, including Iran’s missile capabilities, its regional proxy network, or the many canisters of near-bomb-grade enriched uranium — what the president calls nuclear dust.
Even the future status of the Strait of Hormuz, the critical passage for oil open before the war, and now established as a lever for Iran to exert pressure, appears destined for further negotiation rather than decisive resolution.
The advocates of maximal pressure promised a better deal than the JCPOA. They promised that Iran would be forced to make concessions unavailable through diplomacy.
Instead, after years of confrontation, Washington finds itself lifting pressure, restoring economic benefits, negotiating with a surviving regime and postponing the most difficult questions to future talks.
Hell, in Paris last week, Trump actually made the case for Iran to retain, build or buy missiles and maintain at least some nuclear power.
So, what, precisely, was achieved?
The tragedy is not merely that the war failed to accomplish its objectives. It is that we already possessed a framework that constrained Iran’s nuclear program without requiring military confrontation. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was imperfect, to be sure. Its supporters never claimed otherwise. But it reduced risk, established verification mechanisms and avoided precisely the cycle of escalation that has consumed the past decade.
Its opponents insisted there was a better way.
History has now rendered its verdict.
The United States ultimately abandoned a functioning diplomatic framework in pursuit of fantasies that proved unattainable. Having exhausted sanctions, threats and military force, it has arrived back at the negotiating table poorer, weaker and in possession of less leverage than before.
I’m afraid I told you so.
The defenders of the JCPOA were mocked as appeasers. Yet the memorandum of understanding now before us amounts to an admission of the very proposition we advanced all along: However distasteful it may be, the Islamic Republic is not a problem that can be bombed or sanctioned out of existence.
Diplomacy could have spared us the war.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Lander unseats Goldman on winning congressional election night for Mamdani
Former City Comptroller Brad Lander handily defeated incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman in the New York Democratic primary Tuesday night, while lesser-known Assemblymember Claire Valdez secured the nomination for another House seat — both after campaigning as sharp critics of Israel and with the endorsement of Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Preliminary results showed Lander with about 66% of the vote to Goldman’s 34%. Valdez won with 56% of the vote for the open seat being vacated by Rep. Nydia Velazquez. Both are virtually assured of winning the general election in November in their heavily Democratic districts.
A third candidate whom Mamdani had endorsed, former Columbia Gaza war encampment organizer Darializa Avila Chevalier, held a slight lead over Rep. Adriano Espaillat on Tuesday night.
Representing a spectrum ranging from liberal Zionist critic (Lander) to longtime activist for the Palestinian cause (Avila Chevalier), the strong results for Mamdani’s chosen candidates is being closely watched nationally in a Democratic Party where many voters say they want the U.S. to distance itself from Israel. All three candidates say they will support cutting off U.S. military aid to Israel, including for the Iron Dome defense system.
At a campaign rally last week, Mamdani compared the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to “monsters” who “move millions in dark money to accomplish a single goal — to preserve their power, so that they can turn us against one another.” The remarks drew widespread condemnation from Jewish leaders, including some Mamdani supporters.
Lander is a high-profile Jewish politician allied with Mamdani, who this election cycle threw his weight behind a slate of progressive candidates who have critiqued hardline pro-Israel money and use the terms “genocide” and “apartheid” to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank.
Setting out to challenge the incumbent, Lander zeroed in on Goldman’s support for U.S. military aid to Israel and his past ties to the campaign fundraising group AIPAC during the campaign.
Lander told the New York Times that criticizing AIPAC makes him “queasy” given “the antisemitic tropes at play,” but that he feels an obligation to call out its funding nonetheless as he promises to curtail U.S. military aid to Israel.
In NY-7, another candidate backed by Mamdani defeated the incumbent’s handpicked successor. democratic socialist Valdez won against Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, who had the endorsement of outgoing Rep. Velázquez.
But Mamdani’s brand of Israel politics didn’t succeed everywhere: In the Bronx, Rep. Ritchie Torres — one of the Democratic party’s most staunch supporters of Israel — handily defeated Michael Blake, a former state assemblyman who allied with Mamdani during the mayoral primary last year.
For state comptroller, incumbent Thomas DiNapoli — who made additional purchases of Israel bonds in the aftermath of Oct. 7 — won over Jewish challenger Drew Warshaw, who argued that the state should divest from Israel bonds because they help “finance Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s wars.”
State Assemblymember Micah Lasher won the race to succeed Rep. Jerry Nadler, who retired after 33 years in the House and served as one of Congress’ leading voices for liberal Jews. In that race, the leading candidates Lasher and Alex Bores had broad agreement in their support of Israel.
The other candidate in the race, Kennedy political scion Jack Schlossberg, had called for conditioning aid to Israel and attempted to draw contrast with Bores and Lasher on the issue. But Schlossberg’s campaign struggled to gain traction amid questions about his lack of political experience.
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Pro-Israel Democrats battle to take on vulnerable Republican Rep. Mike Lawler
(New York Jewish Week) — Voters in New York’s Hudson Valley on Tuesday are choosing a Democrat to challenge the staunchly pro-Israel Republican Rep. Mike Lawler in a heavily Jewish swing district.
Two candidates have emerged as frontrunners in the Democratic primary in New York’s 17th Congressional District, a suburb of New York City that includes about 30,000 Orthodox Jews.
Cait Conley, a military veteran and former national security adviser, leads by double digits in polls this month and prediction markets over Beth Davidson, a member of the Rockland County Legislature who has highlighted her Jewish identity. A poll from Tavern Research last week found that 28% of voters were still undecided as the election approached.
Both are appealing to residents anxious about the cost of living, housing, healthcare and foreign conflicts. The winner will also aim to claw back moderate voters who supported Lawler, one of the most vocally pro-Israel members of Congress and a representative who has forged close ties with Orthodox Jewish voters.
Davidson and Conley have both said they support the United States alliance with Israel while opposing actions by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. During a candidate forum in April, they distanced themselves from Democratic efforts in the Senate to block certain military sales to Israel.
Polling far behind Conley and Davidson is Effie Phillips-Staley, a progressive who says Israel is an apartheid state that has committed genocide in Gaza.
Conley and Davidson say they are marrying pro-Israel views with a liberal agenda, including fighting President Donald Trump. Davidson told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that she wants to create a political home for “Jews that have felt lost in the Democratic party.” She previously served on the board of her White Plains synagogue, Beth Am Shalom, and has touted Jewish values as driving her public service, including tikkun olam, or repairing the world, and welcoming the stranger.
Conley has presented her military experience as an advantage. A former national security adviser in the Biden administration, she has said that she supports a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and views Israel as a critical national security ally.
The winner will face off with Lawler, who has become so closely identified with the district’s Jewish community that he was recently attacked in comments by Sen. Rand Paul’s son, William Paul, who accused the lawmaker of being one of “you people,” although Lawler is not Jewish.
Often working with Democrats, Lawler has proposed a spate of legislation aimed at supporting Israel since he entered Congress in 2023. He co-sponsored the bipartisan Antisemitism Awareness Act, which would require the Department of Education to codify the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, a move championed by major Jewish groups and criticized by progressives for classifying some forms of Israel criticism as antisemitic. The bill passed in the House in 2024 but stalled in the Senate amid free speech concerns and was reintroduced in the House last year.
Lawler also introduced in 2024 the bipartisan Stand with Israel Act, which seeks to halt funding for United Nations agencies that “expel, downgrade, suspend, or otherwise restrict the participation of the State of Israel.” His bipartisan 2025 Bunker Buster Act seeks to equip Israel with massive bombs to target Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.
This year, Lawler has partnered with Democrats on two new measures that he says will combat antisemitism. The Jewish American Security Act introduced this month proposes expanding federal security support for Jewish institutions, and a House resolution from April condemns leftist streamer Hasan Piker and far-right podcaster Candace Owens for “antisemitic hate-filled rhetoric and content.”
Phillips-Staley represents the rising progressive wing of the Democratic party that is sharply critical of Israel, differentiating herself from Lawler as well as Conley and Davidson. Phillips-Staley has said that her views solidified after she traveled to Israel and the West Bank in February. She was criticized by some Democratic officials for doing an interview with Piker.
She told JTA in March that many Jewish residents supported her belief that Israel has committed genocide and the United States should sever military aid.
“I get the most encouragement, from lots of people, but a lot of encouragement from Jews who really challenged me, especially in the beginning, to be brave and say it like it is,” said Philips-Staley.
Republicans are suspected of jumping into the late stage of the race by funding a shadowy new group called Progressive Champions PAC, which mirrors GOP efforts to influence other Democratic primaries nationwide. Davidson publicly disavowed the PAC, which has spent $1.5 million on ads attacking Conley for her contract work for an AI company that works with the Department of Homeland Security, according to the Cook Political Report.
The primary winner will quickly rocket to national prominence in the general election, as Lawler’s seat is considered one of the most likely to flip in November. Democrats outnumber Republicans in the district, which former presidential candidate Kamala Harris won by less than one percentage point in 2024.
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