How to Belong When You’ve Always Been An Outsider with Rabbi Angela Buchdahl

What do you do when you feel like an outsider?

We spoke to Rabbi Angela Buchdahl who turned her experience of being a cultural and religious outsider into a source of strength.

Raised in a biracial, mixed-faith American-Korean family, her identity was both welcomed and questioned in Korean and Jewish communities.

She later would later go on to become one of the most prominent and influential public rabbis in the United States, the first female East Asian senior rabbi at NYC's Central Synagogue, and writer of the bestselling memoir Heart of a Stranger.

We spoke about:

• Owning multiple identities, not fitting in and how to create a steady sense of self
• The religious conversion instinct and how to have religious humility
• Key Hebrew ideas that Rabbi Angela lives by
• The radical offering of religious communities in our divided times: community, awe, proximity
• Navigating tokenism as the first East Asian ordained rabbi

---

🎙️Listen to ⁠The Sacred Podcast⁠: https://linktr.ee/sacredpodcast

📖 Follow ⁠Elizabeth Oldfield: https://www.elizabetholdfield.com/

💡Produced by ⁠⁠Theos Think Tank⁠⁠ in partnership with ⁠⁠Comment Magazine⁠⁠ and with support from ⁠⁠The Jerusalem Trust⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠Open Society Foundations

👉 Follow Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: https://www.instagram.com/rabbibuchdahl/?hl=en

Our guests and listeners to our podcast come from all kinds of perspectives and what draws us together is a desire to be self-aware about our own values and curious about other peoples. Comment your reflections below, we read them all👇