Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Roots in two countries
Her father was American and Jewish, and her mother was a Korean Buddhist who had lived through a war and forced exile. Her mother was born under Japanese occupation in Japan, so her own life began with a boundary crossing. The girl was born biracial in Korea, an ethnonational state, and knew from the start that she wasn't like everybody else. She moved to the United States at about five.
Growing up in Tacoma
Tacoma was a random place for a biracial Korean kid to end up Jewish, but her father's side had been there for three generations and had helped found the community. It was incredibly small and tight-knit. Her family didn't look like any other in the 300-family synagogue, yet a picture of her grandfather in an AA basketball uniform hung on the wall, and she felt connected and deeply rooted.
The pull to pray
She sang to God when she was eight and led her sister in prayers as a kid. Jews don't tend to call it a calling, but it felt like a pull beyond her control, and being a rabbi was all she wanted to do.
How does someone become a rabbi?
The word rabbi means my teacher in Hebrew, and the title historically went to scholars who earned ordination, called semikhah, from their own teachers. Today most rabbis in the United States study for five or six years at a seminary after college, learning Talmud, Jewish law, and pastoral work. Some seminaries are tied to particular movements, such as Hebrew Union College for Reform Judaism and the Jewish Theological Seminary for Conservative Judaism. In 1972, Sally Priesand became the first woman ordained as a rabbi by a United States seminary, at Hebrew Union College.
Why do Koreans see themselves as one people?
Korean national identity took shape in resistance to Japanese rule, which lasted from 1910 to 1945, and writers of that period stressed a single bloodline shared by all Koreans. The idea, often called danil minjok, or single-people nation, stayed central in both North and South Korea after the peninsula was divided. In 2007, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination urged South Korea to reconsider its emphasis on ethnic homogeneity.
Why did so many Koreans live in Japan?
Japan annexed Korea in 1910, and the colonial economy pushed many Koreans, including farmers squeezed off the land, to look for work in Japan. By 1945, roughly two million Koreans lived there. After the war, most returned to the Korean Peninsula, and several hundred thousand stayed. Their descendants are known in Japan as Zainichi Koreans.