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........

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