Being a Stranger Can Become a Superpower

Rabbi Angela Buchdahl was explaining the title of her memoir, Heart of a Stranger, when she was asked for her best pitch for Judaism. She said the pitch is in the title, and in the history behind it.

"You feel like a stranger. So do I," she said. "Let that be the first point of human connection between us."

What she means, she explained, starts with language. She said the word Hebrew literally means "to cross over, to be a boundary crosser." She added, "Because to be a Hebrew is to know what it feels like to be a stranger," shaped by 400 years as slaves in Egypt and 2,000 years living in other countries where, in her words, Jews "were more or less at home but never fully of the place."

She learned that feeling early, she said. She described her story as one of boundary crossing, born a biracial child in Korea, a country where most people share one ethnicity, where she recognized from the beginning that she was not like everybody else.

Her father is American and Jewish. Her mother was born in Japan during the Japanese occupation and remains a Korean Buddhist. Her mother lived through war and forced exile, and Buchdahl said people who come out of such experiences alive have "a certain kind of fortitude." After the family moved to Tacoma, Washington, when Buchdahl was about 5, she grew up in a 300-family synagogue her Jewish relatives helped found, where she said her family "didn't look like any other Jewish family in our 300 family synagogue."

Buchdahl said the memoir took her four years to write. The interviewer noted that it tells her life story in very short chapters. Buchdahl called it strange that the kid many people did not see or recognize as Jewish is now "one of the spokespeople for the Jewish community," and she said the growing community and platform around her work is what let her write a wider book about Judaism itself.

Her argument is that strangerhood is now the human experience, not only a Jewish one. She pointed to Asian Americans who felt misunderstood and hated after the pandemic, to an unresolved race issue, to immigrants, and to white Christian men who also feel misunderstood and marginalized. Judaism, she said, offers "a blueprint for taking that experience and making that into your superpower of empathy, of creativity, of resilience, of grit."

She said many people respond to that feeling by building higher walls, pushing others out, and demonizing the other side, and she argues for the reverse.