SAN FRANCISCO (RNS) – A few years ago, Grace Elizabeth Dy, who then worked for the University of Washington’s Jewish studies center, was attending a conference in Jerusalem for Jewish lay leaders when several attendees began questioning Dy’s Jewishness. They said Dy, who is of Filipino and Taiwanese descent, didn’t look Jewish, among other insensitive remarks. Dy, who goes by the pronouns they/them, said they had a breakdown and felt like leaving.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, the first Asian American to be ordained as a rabbi and as a cantor, happened to be in Jerusalem that day, attending a different conference. Buchdahl heard that Dy was having a hard time and reached out on WhatsApp to invite Dy to Shabbat dinner at her Airbnb.
“We had an honest conversation about the challenges that Asian and Jewish women face in Jewish leadership roles,” Dy recalled.
Today, Dy, 28, is a Hebrew school teacher and chaplain at Seattle University. They were recently accepted to rabbinical school at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Buchdahl’s alma mater. Their choice is no coincidence.
Grace Elizabeth Dy. (Courtesy photo)
“She has made pursuing the rabbinate feel like an actual possibility,” Dy, who converted to Judaism in college, said. “I’m very grateful to be able to learn from her and ask the big questions in a way that doesn’t feel as lonely or isolating as it had earlier in my professional life.”
The Korean-born Buchdahl, who is senior rabbi of Central Synagogue in Manhattan, is the closest thing the United States has to a celebrity rabbi. She has lit Hanukkah candles at White House Hanukkah parties. On television, she has appeared on shows such as “Finding Your Roots,” with Henry Louis Gates Jr. She was a clue on “Jeopardy!” Earlier this year a clip of her singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” at an event with “The Late Show” host Stephen Colbert went viral on Instagram.
But for the tiny community of Asian American Jews, Buchdahl, 53, has become something more: a revered mentor who can empathize with those who have felt excluded because of their race, gender or religious status, and a voice in the larger Jewish world that has granted young Asian American Jews credibility.
Buchdahl has welcomed this role because she experienced exclusion herself. Born in Seoul to a Korean Buddhist mother and Jewish American father, she moved with her family to Tacoma, Washington, when she was 5. “Growing up, it was hard that I never saw someone like me or my sister anywhere in the Jewish community, not in the synagogue, not in leadership, not in any Jewish books or stories,” she said in an email interview.
“I am hopeful that, as we now have many Asian Jewish leaders making an impact in the Jewish community, added to the more diverse leadership we see across many different communities, that the Jewish world opens up for anyone who wants to belong.”
Buchdahl is not only a source of inspiration for Asian Jews, but for Jews of color of other backgrounds. “She’s a beautiful example of the promise of a multiracial Jewish community,” said Ilana Kaufman, the CEO of the Jews of Color Initiative, a research and grantmaking organization based in Berkeley, California.
Jews of color comprise 12%-15% of the American Jewish population, according to a study commissioned by Kaufman’s group. Meanwhile, Asians make up about 1%, according to a 2020 Pew Research Center survey. Other than the 2016 book by researchers Helen Kim and Noah Leavitt, “JewAsian: Race, Religion, and Identity for America’s Newest Jews,” and a just-released report on Japanese American Jews, the community has not been closely studied.
On a recent stop in the Bay Area on a tour for her newly released memoir, “Heart of a Stranger: An Unlikely Rabbi’s Story of Faith, Identity, and Belonging,” Buchdahl made time to meet with local Asian Jews and other Jews of color, some who admitted to being starstruck. “It’s really rare for somebody to make other people feel so seen and feel so valued, and she made me feel that way,” said Levi Meir Clancy, who has Ashkenazi and Indigenous Okinawan heritage.
Levi Meir Clancy, second from right, with Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, center, and members of the Lunar Collective in the Bay Area, Dec. 2, 2025. (Photo courtesy of Levi Meir Clancy)
Clancy, 35, is an organizer with the Lunar Collective, a 3-year-old nonprofit that connects Asian American Jews with each other and tells their stories. In planning events for the group, Clancy said he draws inspiration from Buchdahl’s ability to bring people together across political and ideological differences. “She has a special talent for having people share space and find common ground,” Clancy said. “There’s not a lot of people who I can look up to for that kind of leadership.”
At Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco on Dec. 3, Buchdahl told the crowd of 800 people about her path to becoming a rabbi. She and her younger sister, Gina, were among very few Jews at their school in Washington. “People thought in Tacoma, Jews looked like me and my sister. What did they know?” Buchdahl said to laughter from the audience.
As teens, the sisters participated in a summer fellowship in Israel, where their identities as Jews were challenged. Gina ultimately retreated from Jewish life, but Buchdahl decided to “lean in,” she said. “By the end of that summer, I was like, ‘Oh, you don’t think I’m Jewish? I’m going to be a rabbi.’”
Five years later, she underwent a conversion — what she described as a “reaffirmation” — in the Reform movement, which has recognized Jews by patrilineal descent, in addition to the traditional matrilineal custom, since 1983.
Like Buchdahl, Miles Borgen grew up in Washington state with a non-Jewish Asian parent and a white Ashkenazi one. His siblings had bar and bat mitzvahs, but he chose not to be involved at synagogue past the third grade. “I just never felt part of it,” the 36-year-old San Francisco resident said. “There was always an otherness that existed.”
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl sings “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” at Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco, Dec. 3, 2025. (Photo courtesy of the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco)
Borgen asked Buchdahl during a Q&A session how he could reclaim a feeling of belonging in the Jewish community, both for himself and for his 2-year-old daughter. Buchdahl cited a story from the Torah in which the 99-year-old Hebrew patriarch Abraham, newly circumcised, welcomes guests into his tent.
“When you are feeling like you are the stranger, maybe the most powerful thing you can do is reach out to the person who feels even one more step removed or more of a stranger than you,” she replied. “It’s an interesting thing how it doesn’t just transform them. It transforms you.”
For now, Asian American Jews have to depend on this kind of solidarity. “There’s something about knowing the kind of marginalization that we encounter in the Jewish community and not having to convince somebody else of the reality of it,” said Rabbi Jacqueline Mates-Muchin, the first Chinese American rabbi and a former classmate of Buchdahl’s, who has led Temple Sinai in Oakland for a decade. “It’s been very meaningful when folks reach out and want to be able to learn from my experiences.”
But the idea of an Asian American rabbi is becoming more commonplace, if not exactly expected. If Dy completes rabbinical school, they believe they will be the 10th Asian American to become a rabbi or cantor.
Buchdahl told them recently: “One day we’ll have enough Asian clergy to actually hold a minyan,” referring to a quorum required for Jewish prayer.
