For most of my childhood, my family and I attended services at Central Synagogue, a Reform congregation in Midtown Manhattan. Every week we took our favorite spot in the Moorish Revival sanctuary, six rows back on the left, then lingered after services to schmooze with the clergy. Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, when I was attending regularly, the synagogue was an intimate but not exactly dynamic community — turnout on Friday evenings rarely exceeded a hundred people. The exception was when the congregation emerged in full force for the High Holidays, and the synagogue resorted to an undisguised class hierarchy to solve its seating problem. A “Community Service,” the most affordable option, took place in an overflow auditorium across the street. The “Family Service,” for which tickets were more costly, deviated from ritual norms by starting around sundown, forcing attendees to begin their Yom Kippur fast either early or late. Finally, the “Assigned Seating Service” occupied the main sanctuary at the appropriate times, granting proximity to the bimah on the basis of past donations. By any objective standard, everyone we knew at Central was wealthy. But on the High Holidays, it was impossible to miss the steep gradations of affluence and power.
Already back then, Central’s membership included some of the country’s leading financial managers, real estate developers, and corporate executives. But the synagogue’s size and stature — its reputation as one of America’s most prominent Reform congregations — have soared since the arrival of Angela Buchdahl.
Two decades ago, Buchdahl joined Central’s clergy in the role of senior cantor. She is now the synagogue’s first female head rabbi, the first Korean American rabbi ever, and the closest thing Reform Judaism has to a global superstar. Buchdahl delivers sermons that are livestreamed around the world, makes regular appearances on network morning shows to speak on matters of Jewish life, and has officiated at Jewish holiday celebrations in Washington under presidents Obama and Biden. Her New York Times–bestselling autobiography, Heart of a Stranger, recounts her meteoric rise and shattering of a rabbinical glass ceiling, making the case for a multicultural, liberal, “quintessentially American” form of Judaism. When the book was published in October 2025, Stephen Colbert was there to emcee the launch.
Buchdahl was born in Seoul in 1972. Her mother, Yi Sulja, was the daughter of a Korean resistance fighter who delivered clandestine communications for the Korean independence movement during World War II; her father, Fred Warnick, was a third-generation Jewish American whose family built a successful mill-working business in Tacoma. The two met after Warnick traveled to Korea for his ROTC service requirement, and the family relocated to Tacoma when Buchdahl was 5. Growing up in the United States, Buchdahl found a sense of belonging among the local Jewish community as well as an inkling of her calling through music. Her earliest experiences of standing before a congregation came as a song leader, first at Jewish summer camps, then at home in Tacoma. “When I sang Jewish music and prayer,” Buchdahl recalls, “I came alive and felt like God heard me.” At the age of 16, she realized her dream was to become a rabbi.
As the child of an interfaith and interracial marriage, Buchdahl learned early on that her efforts to gain acceptance from other Jews would be difficult and sometimes painful. Her Buddhist mother studied Hebrew, sang in the choir, and cooked “wontons for the oneg,” but she refrained from converting, and the congregation “never quite treated her as one of them.” In an early chapter, Buchdahl recalls noticing “that Mom was different from all the Jews. And that meant that I was different from all the Jews, too.” Buchdahl was 11 in 1983 when the American Reform movement broke with the halachic tradition of tracing Jewish identity through matrilineal descent alone. But in her racial and religious difference, she endured enough bruising interrogation of her status as a “real Jew” that during her senior year of college, she decided to put that skepticism to rest and formally convert.
Hers is a strategy of demanding more empathy while abjuring any radical challenge to the status quo.
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These formative experiences of misrecognition and exclusion play a crucial role in Heart of a Stranger, which marshals Buchdahl’s backstory to press for a more expansive definition of the Jewish community. Noting that the name “Hebrews” translates literally as “those who cross over,” Buchdahl narrates her own life as a modern-day “boundary crosser” to expound her vision of spiritual leadership. “In this time of unprecedented loneliness and fracture, our own feelings of outsiderness [can] spur empathy rather than anger,” Buchdahl writes. Her wager is that by embracing difference, congregants will see in their religion a reflection of America’s “mixed multitude.”
Heart of a Stranger is the story of Buchdahl’s journey as an “unlikely rabbi.” It is also the story of her triumphant impact on an evolving Reform Judaism, one that casts her every personal or professional obstacle as an opportunity for further progress. In her earlier years as Central’s senior cantor, Buchdahl modernizes the synagogue’s repertoire and brings a guitar onto the bimah. What some naysayers call “happy-clappy music” becomes a new “Central sound” that boosts attendance for Friday night services. Around 2012, Buchdahl considers applying for the position of head rabbi, even though many around her — including her mentor and predecessor, Rabbi Peter Rubinstein — openly doubt she can take on the role. But she wins the job anyway, and proves she can fulfill her duties even while parenting three children. Months into her tenure, she’s invited to light the Hanukkah menorah at the Obama White House.
Buchdahl’s ambition is for Reform Judaism to fully realize its “core principles of ethical living, pursuit of justice, equality, scientific inquiry, and academic truth.” Yet she stays humble, admitting that she felt unworthy, or at least apprehensive, before her first trip to the White House. She agreed to go after her husband reminded her that leaders must “assume our rightful place in order to fulfill our purpose.” In case the connection Buchdahl maps over the book’s first two hundred pages is not yet clear, she recollects of her visit: “I spoke of what it meant to be the first female Korean rabbi invited to represent the Jewish community in the People’s House. And I was honored to address the first Black president of the United States, who himself had the appropriate anavah [humility] to take his place in the White House when the moment called him.”
If the year 2014 sealed her place as Reform Judaism’s Barack Hussein Obama, Buchdahl has continued to position herself as a leader working to unite opposing extremes. Much as Obama frequently advocated compromise and conciliation to keep a divided nation together, Buchdahl has worked to counteract a deepening of divisions within Central during her tenure as head rabbi. The memoir describes select aspects of the outside world — #MeToo, Covid, Black Lives Matter — that have intruded onto the sanctuary, emphasizing the difficult conflicts that daily threaten to tear American Jewry, and the nation, apart. Each time, Buchdahl calls for all sides of the dispute to understand each other; in a telling passage on George Floyd’s murder, she criticizes the US’s legacy of racism, but writes that she can see “how even white men in America are feeling abandoned, denigrated, and disregarded, shamed for the sins of the nation’s forefathers, disadvantaged in the job market, assumed to have the worst traits of ‘privilege.’” Hers is a strategy of demanding more empathy while abjuring any radical challenge to the status quo. Albeit with some minor adjustments, the assigned seating service at Central remains intact.
Like the Reform movement as a whole, the political affiliations of Buchdahl’s congregants skew strongly toward the Democratic Party. But Central has always counted among its members some number of conservative or Republican-voting families, and Heart of a Stranger recounts the rabbi’s knotty conversations with those who support Trump’s immigration policies or his Islamophobic rhetoric. Buchdahl concedes that this latest politics of exclusion contravenes a vital directive in the Torah to welcome the stranger, yet she portrays Central as a place where such disagreements are ultimately transcended by the sacred universalism of the life cycle. Members of all kinds, she emphasizes, get married, have babies, and lose loved ones to accident, disease, or old age. A rabbi overseeing major life events cannot risk severing interpersonal connection with her charges.
Besides, Buchdahl writes, “Judaism emphasizes that there is more than one way to look at an argument.” It’s clear that at Central, the need to make congregants feel safe and seen takes priority over confronting them with hard stances or rigorous debate. During prayer, Buchdahl writes, she encourages her congregants to “tune in to the cadence of the ancient Hebrew language, to speak aloud — and without inhibition — to an unseen power.” Or, as she puts it, “to think less.” The head rabbi frequently sings the praises of ambiguity and ideological diversity, which she presents as two of the preeminent virtues of the Jewish textual tradition. Invoking her “boundary crosser” status, Buchdahl frames her Judaism as one that accommodates a broad range of perspectives and political stances into its fold; in sermons and interviews, she often repeats the old laugh line about how there will always be at least as many opinions as there are Jews in a room.
And yet there is one issue on which Buchdahl sees little place for disagreement — where ambiguity and ideological diversity are hardly welcome. As a self-described Zionist, the rabbi has used her position at Central’s pulpit to call for loyalty to Israel while swiftly rejecting critiques of the Jewish state or its genocide in Gaza. “Jewish history and sovereignty on that land goes back millennia,” Buchdahl pronounced in a sermon a week after October 7. “As Jews, Israel is our country. And we are not going anywhere.” In an autobiography that strains painfully to indulge every side of countless other conflicts, Israel remains for Buchdahl a subject of clear and total conviction. When it comes to her Zionism, the rabbi is a hardliner, tacking to the right of many in her congregation and seemingly eager to bring the rest of Reform Judaism with her.
Though basic questions about her identity had undoubtedly arisen beforehand, the first place young Angela encountered direct, repeated, and hostile interrogation of her legitimacy as a Jew was in Israel. By her own account, it was in response to such scarring incidents that she decided to undergo conversion; faced with similar humiliations, she reveals, her younger sister Gina abandoned organized religion altogether. Another writer might have taken these experiences as opportunities to reflect on how the US’s and Israel’s radically different approaches to citizenship relate to the questions of diversity, belonging, and identity that have preoccupied Buchdahl for most of her life. Instead, she recounts these episodes solely for what they reveal about “just how fragile identity can be,” and never for what they suggest about the political spaces in which they occurred.
For Buchdahl, Israel always “felt like a home that had been waiting for my return,” and in Heart of a Stranger it appears as a country populated only by Jews. Buchdahl’s first visit, as a Bronfman fellow, occurred in 1989, though there’s no indication that she was aware that the First Intifada was taking place at the time. She returned in the summer of 1993, on the eve of the Oslo Accords, but again Palestinians seem to have left no trace on her trip or her memory. In fact, the first Palestinians mentioned in Heart of a Stranger are the “Hamas militants perched on the back of pickup trucks” whom Buchdahl sees on social media on October 7, 2023. She uses the word Palestinian exactly once in the book’s three-hundred-plus pages.
This sweeping erasure resonates with the version of Zionism that Buchdahl has publicly espoused since assuming leadership at Central. Though it goes unmentioned in the autobiography, her promotion to head rabbi in 2014 coincided with Israel’s military campaign in Gaza that year. As the country bombarded the Strip, killing more than two thousand Palestinians in seven weeks, Benjamin Netanyahu announced that he would never “relinquish security control of the territory west of the River Jordan.” The Obama Administration, seemingly in denial that an ally had just broken with long-standing US policy, continued to pour resources into the pursuit of a two-state solution. But the prime minister of Israel had made clear in words what had been obvious in practice for most of his career: Namely, that he would never be a partner in that process.
That summer, reports of rising body counts, slaughtered Palestinian children, and Israeli violations of international law occasioned a global wave of outcry, including within the American Jewish community. For more than two decades, the American Reform Movement and its parent organizations had taken a liberal Zionist position of support for the Oslo framework. But in 2014, there were many reasons to doubt whether that position remained tenable. And indeed, for a growing number of American Jews, the sustained spectacle of gruesome, asymmetric violence unleashed on the besieged inhabitants of Gaza became reason to reconsider long-held assumptions about the Jewish state.
Not for Buchdahl. That autumn, she delivered her first Kol Nidre sermon as Central’s head rabbi, standing before the congregation to correct misconceptions and assuage doubts. Presenting herself as part teacher, part therapist, she lamented those American Jews, “most especially the young,” who had come to see Israel as “a regional military superpower oppressing its neighbors.” Not only did their disproportionate focus on Gaza blind them to Israel’s rich history, vibrant arts and culture, and scholarly achievements — these skeptics had fallen victim to a fundamental misapprehension: For “too many American Jews, our relationship with Israel is too contingent on the actions of whatever government happens to be in power.” Zionism must stand as a commitment outside politics or circumstance. “I want you,” Buchdahl declared, “to love Israel.”
Buchdahl reminded her audience that criticism of Israel was a betrayal of Jewish identity, as the country was “a necessary haven for Jews everywhere in the world, especially after the Holocaust.” Her husband’s assimilated Jewish ancestors, she explained, had once imagined that their German patriotism would keep them safe from persecution, but the rise of the Third Reich had revealed the grave error of all such assumptions. Though she noted that her husband’s relatives had fled from the Nazis to the US, not to Palestine, Buchdahl observed that the American government had imposed limits on Jewish immigration in that moment of greatest peril. Her point, of course, was that Israel remained the only nation where the right of return was guaranteed. “Israel is our motherland,” Buchdahl said before a piano began to play. “Israel is our safe haven. Israel is the beating heart of the Jewish people. And Israel is ours.”
She uses the word Palestinian exactly once in the book’s three-hundred-plus pages.
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The rabbi left her congregation little time to contemplate this closing flourish of blood-and-soil nationalism as she hit the opening notes of “Hatikvah” and launched into a medley of patriotic Israeli songs. But in both its rhetorical maneuvers and core arguments, the sermon took a position far to the right of where many of Buchdahl’s congregants had once seen themselves. The suggestion that the status of Palestinians should have no bearing on Jewish ties to Israel is directly at odds with the kind of liberal Zionism that was common in congregations like Central for the previous two decades, where Palestinians’ right to a separate state had been understood as a core commitment. Though Buchdahl herself has elsewhere gestured at support for a two-state solution, her central claim in that moment of critical scrutiny toward Israel was that Jewish attachment to the Jewish state must exist outside the specific policies it pursues and regardless of its relationship to the Palestinians. And to anyone in the room who paused to consider it, that assertion might have posed some problems for a range of other arguments commonly mobilized in Israel’s defense. If Israel is not just one exclusionary nation state among others but the political materialization of Judaism’s highest ideals, then should not Jews be at least as concerned as the rest of humanity when that state commits war crimes? If Israel is not an increasingly authoritarian apartheid regime but “the Middle East’s only democracy,” then should not the things its elected officials do and say remain a legitimate target of criticism? In retrospect, what was most surprising about the new head rabbi’s sermon was how little response it elicited.
Although it may have been difficult to discern at the time, and Buchdahl showed no signs of having noticed it, the logic of her case for Israel contained a subtle tension. As “motherland,” Israel exists for Jews outside of history, politics, or substantive deliberation of any kind. But as “haven,” it represents a practical — and fundamentally political — solution to the specific, earthly problem of antisemitism. Before Biden’s refrain, nearly a decade later, that without Israel “no Jew in the world would be ultimately safe,” Buchdahl was already championing the Jewish state as the sole bulwark against that hatred in all its manifestations. But even her sermon’s loaded comparison between Israel and the United States as historic sites of immigration implicitly recognized that other political arrangements might furnish protection to Jews as a minority, and that the project of liberal democracy in America, however flawed, has remained an appealing alternative for millions. Buchdahl could argue that loyalty to Israel and defense against antisemitism were one and the same, but there was in fact no logical basis to assume this would always be the case.
These tensions would become even more palpable once Donald Trump began his first term as president. On the campaign trail and in office, Trump had amplified antisemitic hate speech and conspiracy theories even as he cultivated ties to Netanyahu and boasted he was “the most pro-Israel of all time.” In 2017, his infamous remark after Charlottesville — that there were “very fine people on both sides” — seemed like an obvious occasion for a rabbi concerned about antisemitism to speak out. But when Central’s congregation gathered for the High Holidays six weeks later, Buchdahl uttered not a word about the white nationalist rally.
There was perhaps an obvious obstacle to Buchdahl’s mentioning the topic: Some among her congregation, including important donors to the synagogue, had worked with Trump, voted for Trump, or backed Trump’s presidential bid, and others likely perceived him to be more supportive of Israel than Obama or Hillary Clinton. It’s hard to know, of course, how calculated Buchdahl was being when she opted not to address one of the most brazen public manifestations of antisemitism on American soil in decades. But given the urgency and frequency with which she had been warning her congregants against a global resurgence of anti-Jewish hate, this deflection by Reform Judaism’s Barack Obama was striking.
Instead, Buchdahl delivered a sermon about the fiftieth anniversary of Israel’s 1967 Six-Day War. It was a surprising choice, in part because 1967 is a sensitive subject for many liberal Zionists. The war — which ended in Israel seizing the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula — has long been perceived as a historic turning point that transformed Israel from a scrappy Jewish state into an occupying power. In its heyday, the balancing act of liberal Zionist thought rested on 1967’s fulcrum: By judging the Six-Day War as an act of aggression, or at least overreach, proponents of the two-state solution were able both to insulate Israel’s 1948 borders from critical scrutiny and to justify the proposed exchange of land for peace. Yet for Buchdahl the war was simply a “miracle.” Just as right-wing opponents of the Oslo process had invoked the conquest as an act of divine intervention, Buchdahl’s sermon espoused a nativist vision in which “Hebron, Jericho, and above all, Jerusalem — the holy places of our Biblical past” were “recaptured” and assimilated into historical Israel. In 2014, her accommodation with the territorial maximalism of the Israeli right had still required some interpretation, albeit not much. The message in 2017 was unmistakable.
If the political shift Buchdahl was charting failed to register as significant with her audience, then it could be because she had couched her sermon in a familiar discourse of evenhandedness and mutual recognition. After her opening celebration of the war, Buchdahl described a trip to Israel the previous summer, where she had, for the first time, “crossed the Green Line to witness the post-’67 landscape for myself.” She had met both Jewish settlers and Palestinian refugees, and confronted the dramatic asymmetry between their experiences of Israel’s fifty-year occupation. She had seen “dilapidated” Palestinian villages, “bucolic” Jewish settlements, and a web of security checkpoints and physical barriers that thwarted even the most routine daily movements for Palestinians. She also recounted conversations with Jewish settlers who lamented their own feelings of embattlement and danger.
To many in the audience, this may have sounded like the same concern for “both sides” that has underpinned liberal Zionism for decades. In fact, almost nothing in what Buchdahl said was at odds with the sermon’s opening set piece. She did at some point comment that the West Bank settlements had “become increasingly impossible to defend,” but by this she did not mean they were illegal under international law or a moral blight — rather, she meant they were literally becoming indefensible, that the menace posed by Palestinian violence made it necessary for the Israeli state to deploy an increasingly repressive security response. She also opined about “the absence of any viable peace process,” but attributed this neither to the Israeli government nor to the continuous expansion of settlements. Instead, she rattled off a series of tropes — many of them easy to debunk as incorrect if not dishonest — about the absence of a “credible Palestinian partner.” So when Buchdahl concluded that it was essential to build “the foundation for an eventual peace,” she was conjuring a resolution that would, perhaps “miraculously,” require no material concessions of any sort from the Israeli side. To the extent that Benjamin Netanyahu still speaks of a future peace, this is exactly what he means.
In the autumn of 2017, however, the political figure foremost in her congregants’ minds was not Bibi Netanyahu but Donald Trump. And the message Buchdahl urged them to take from her sermon was not just about the implications of 1967 for Palestinians and Israelis, but also about the importance of unity within the Jewish community at home. Referencing the famous midrash about the angels who celebrate the drowning of Pharaoh’s army in the Red Sea, she explained that Jewish tradition has, since time immemorial, been riven between universalists who see Jewish experience in the oppression of others and particularists who see Jewish safety as paramount. Jews, she observed, are instructed not to choose between compassion toward other people and protection of our own, “but to unite them as a single ideal. . . . We need both.” In that moment, it was not hard to hear an assertion that political differences within Buchdahl’s congregation should be ignored for the higher ideal of a common heritage. By a characteristic sleight of hand, Buchdahl transformed one of the most divisive events in Israel’s history into a miraculous bridge across the partisan cleavages of 2017.
At first glance, Heart of a Stranger’s repetitive exhortations on the importance of compassion may read as innocuous pabulum: a self-help–inspired Judaism-lite, likely to move copies at airport bookstores. But considered against the longer arc of Buchdahl’s career, her insistence on emotion as its own higher truth takes on a more specific and insidious meaning. It is not simply that elevating the feelings of others so consistently provides Buchdahl with an excuse for withholding judgment on a host of contemporary issues. Well before the current moment’s frontal assault on higher ed, Buchdahl’s politics of sentiment had begun to converge with an explicitly right-wing discourse of anti-intellectualism and academic repression. Throughout her tenure as head rabbi, she has offered up Central’s bimah as a platform for figures now widely recognized as leaders in this latest iteration of the culture wars, most notably Bari Weiss. And Buchdahl herself has been precocious, creative, and consistent in her elaboration of a contemporary Jewish politics that locates the specter of antisemitism in the very same spaces that the right denounces as bastions of anti-conservative dogma and radical indoctrination.
Central’s head rabbi did eventually speak about Charlottesville. But by that point, in the autumn of 2018, the midterm elections were well underway, and a surge of grassroots organizing had lifted several candidates on the left flank of the Democratic Party into national prominence. Only when she could position herself, yet again, as a moderate did Buchdahl address Trump’s platforming of neo-Nazis and white supremacists. The danger they posed, she now warned, was matched by an equally menacing “antisemitism on the left which often hides behind a false veneer of ‘legitimate’ criticism of Israel.” This latter threat was especially acute for “our high school and college students, because the antisemitism of the left is especially pronounced on liberal campuses.” By acknowledging the actual neo-Nazis marching through American streets and chanting “Jews will not replace us,” Buchdahl was able to present her narrative of festering antisemitic bias in academia as an expression of principled centrism.
A major subject of her Rosh Hashanah sermon that autumn was a recent incident at a New York private school, where the head of the history department had been pressured to resign after he shared news coverage of IDF attacks on Palestinian protesters during the Great March of Return. A group of Jewish parents had mobilized to secure the teacher’s ouster, prompting a journalist who had once studied with him to write a lengthy exposé for HuffPost. The journalist warned that “the real threats to liberal ideals within the academy come from the influential and powerful, people who can demand that a school stand in lockstep with their political agendas or risk losing out on their largesse.” In her sermon, Buchdahl condemned the author for suggesting that a small group of Jewish parents was able to enforce their own expansive interpretation of antisemitism through “wealth and powerful media connections.”1 Opting not to mention that both the targeted teacher and the journalist were Jewish, Buchdahl railed against the article for engaging in “antisemitic dog whistles.” Any concern about academic censorship or influence peddling could only be part of a hateful conspiracy theory about Jewish power.
The mayoral election demonstrated how much Buchdahl’s political trajectory has come to overlap with that of her billionaire congregants.
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Speaking in 2018, Buchdahl was arguably ahead of her time. Since October 7, the claim that academia is an incubator of left-wing antisemitism has become the primary pretext for a new wave of efforts to impose a political realignment on higher education, first in the waning years of the Biden Administration and now in more monstrous proportions under Trump. To the extent that these campaigns have managed to secure bipartisan support, they have done so by accepting feelings — of harm, disorientation, and victimization — as sufficient evidence for allegations of rampant prejudice. Buchdahl’s numerous sermons on the topic of antisemitism regularly contain anecdotes about college students who have expressed discomfort upon encountering unfamiliar descriptions of the Israeli government’s conduct. Like the wider politics of anti-intellectualism in which they partake, these stories rely on a generative confusion about what actually occurs inside universities. It is in just this sense that when Buchdahl professes, in Heart of a Stranger, that she can understand “how even white men in America are feeling,” she unwittingly reveals a structuring affinity between the politics of white reaction and her own anti-anti-Zionism. What they share, most fundamentally, is an elevation of interior experience above any number of other accepted methods for assessing the merits of competing claims about observable reality.
Absolute certainty has been off the table in most lines of inquiry for a very long time, so judgments today often look more like assertions of relative likelihood, buttressed by specific kinds of evidence, than like categorical statements. But the upshot is that schools and universities are, by definition, not places where all opinions are equally valid. If they were, they would cease to serve their distinctive and necessary social function. Likewise, the point of the centuries-long Jewish scholarly tradition — which Buchdahl invokes elsewhere as a source of cultural cachet — is not simply to observe and celebrate a multiplicity of views and feelings. The rabbis of the Talmud did not devote their lives to study and disputation because they thought all opinions were equally valid, but because they knew that they were not. The point might be too agonizingly obvious if denying it were not so consistently a basis for attacks on academia, of which Buchdahl herself has been an enduring and enthusiastic proponent.
By presenting herself as a sage mediator, Buchdahl has been able to straddle what are normally understood as the rabbi’s pastoral and prophetic roles. For those among her congregation pouring money and political capital into right-wing causes, Buchdahl remains bound by her pastoral obligations to withhold judgment, to officiate at weddings, to celebrate at bat mitzvahs. But for any who dare to articulate an opposition to Zionism by asserting that the conferral of full, equal rights for all the inhabitants of historic Palestine might represent the best and most durable guarantee of peace and security to Jews and non-Jews alike, the rabbi stands ready to vigilantly and prophetically condemn. All of this was true before Hamas militants cut and bulldozed their way across Israel’s fence line with Gaza on the morning of October 7, and since then Buchdahl has only doubled down.
When Buchdahl arrives at October 7 in her autobiography, the self-described advocate of empathy, common humanity, and principled relativism suddenly finds within herself the strength to voice an unwavering and absolute moral clarity: “Never before had I felt how important words were for shaping realities,” she writes. In what amounts to an elaboration on that moment’s relentless, accusatory mantra, “Do you condemn Hamas?” she denounces “the muted or ethically opaque statements from the people we look to for moral leadership, like university presidents who could not bring themselves to state clearly the simple truths of these attacks: The perpetrators were murderers, and they targeted Jews.” As she notes, “silence — the absence of words — can enable evil and chaos.”
Buchdahl is not wrong that the initial shock of October 7 produced a range of responses, some of which celebrated acts of heinous violence against individual Israeli civilians. But her performative outrage extends far beyond such instances. Demanding that anyone who commented on Israel’s actions first capitulate to the assessment that October 7 was an instance of pure evil helped establish, in that period, an exceptional permission structure for Israel’s response in Gaza. It was also, in the vein of targeted anti-intellectualism, a rhetorical technique for conflating efforts to understand what had transpired on October 7 with endorsement of the attacks. And while Buchdahl was hardly alone in the visceral intensity of her initial reaction, her narrative about Israel’s ensuing campaign of retribution has changed very little over time. She has continued to blame Hamas for the destruction of Gaza by Israel, to sow doubt on “unreliable numbers from the Gazan Health Ministry,” and to treat as an unsettled matter of opinion “whether the hungry children of Gaza number in the hundreds, or in the hundreds of thousands.”
In a brief gesture at the genocidal methods Israel has employed since 2023, she writes, “I wrestled with . . . the agonizing calculation of how to value a life on one side versus the other.” If Buchdahl’s repeated pleas to “put our fellow human beings first” applied in her mind to the inhabitants of Gaza, then the only answer to her dilemma could be “equally.” One might likewise expect her to condemn absolutely and without qualification the killing, on average, of one Palestinian child every hour of every day for two years straight. The simplest explanation for why she rejects so basic a moral position would be that Buchdahl values Jewish lives more highly than others. But Buchdahl is not a Jewish supremacist in any straightforward sense; after all, the central message of her autobiography is that Jews have always been “an ethnic patchwork,” that anyone can embrace Judaism’s timeless wisdom. Indeed, Buchdahl’s frequent insistence that she does not exempt Israel from all criticism hinges upon her own periodic advocacy, against the country’s religious right, for this more pluralistic, democratic, and inclusive definition of Judaism within the Jewish state. If Jewish life is not, in this sense, worth more than the rest of humanity, it is rather the obverse that has characterized her politics in recent years. According to her particular methods of moral algebra, Palestinian life seems to be worth quite a bit less.
Buchdahl herself might bristle at this reading and counter that Hamas bears full responsibility for the apocalyptic devaluation of Palestinian life in Gaza. This was the line she adopted when she addressed her congregation this past Rosh Hashanah just weeks before Heart of a Stranger hit the shelves. As usual, her professions of outrage and anguish were carefully distributed on two sides. In twenty-five years as a rabbi, she confided, “I have never been so afraid to talk about Israel.” Her own feelings, she continued, were split between her unconditional love for “our beleaguered homeland” and her heartbreak over “the civilian deaths and tragic suffering in Gaza.” But for holding one or the other of these paired sentiments, she feared, some among her congregants would now threaten to “stop listening and decide that I’m no longer your rabbi.” Discord over Israel was “ripping our community apart, not just here at Central, but across the Jewish world,” and the root cause was a chronic deficit of empathy. In a political landscape marked by so many widening rifts, this “zero-sum, empathy calculus has encouraged us to dismiss and demonize each other. And not just in Israel’s war, but in ideological battles being fought in our nation every day.”
As usual, all of this may have sounded reasonable, if not particularly courageous. But that was only because Buchdahl elected not to address the real stakes of the “ideological battles” she so lamented. By the autumn of 2025, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch had found that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. The leading academic associations of genocide studies had found that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory had found that Israel was responsible for committing genocide in Gaza. The Israeli human rights organizations B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel had concluded that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. And Jeremy Ben-Ami, founder and president of J Street, had decided that he “cannot and will not argue anymore against those using the term.”
At no point last Rosh Hashanah did Buchdahl name the specific allegation of genocide. The closest she came to uttering the word that evening was when she repeated Netanyahu’s allegations of “antisemitism at the United Nations,” which had released its finding less than a week prior. In the galleys of Heart of a Stranger that circulated last summer, Buchdahl referenced such language only in order to assert that uninformed “celebrities and influencers” were responsible for claims that Israel was perpetrating “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide”; by the date of its release, someone had the good sense to remove that passage. Faced with the mountain of official condemnations and meticulous documentation of Israel’s crimes, Buchdahl’s sermon admonished “those of us whose understandable grief for civilian suffering in Gaza has led us to take the worst accusations against Israel at face value, and for some, to abandon the entire project of a Jewish state.”
In Buchdahl’s signature rendering, the problem of Israel’s critics was an inability to “muster any empathy for Israeli families who have lived for two years under direct attack from Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iran.” Here behind the pained tone of voice and the calls for recognition was a telling illustration of just how smudged the boundary between fact and feeling can become. At issue in that moment was not just “civilian suffering” but the charge of genocide: by most accounts — and especially within the Jewish community — the most serious category of crime that exists. It is a question of both moral judgment and actual law. To the extent that the legal criteria for a finding of genocide turn, at least in part, on the perpetrator’s state of mind, the law too demands a kind of strategic empathy; knowing what Netanyahu and his ministers felt is important for understanding what they intended to do. But the purpose of that mental exercise is purely forensic. Likewise, the growing list of international agencies, NGOs, news outlets, and academic organizations that have documented the Israeli state’s war crimes surely includes many individuals who experience grief and anger about what they have witnessed. But their overwhelming consensus is the product of evidence, verified according to specific professional standards, not unfiltered personal emotions. Loving or hating a murderer will not bring his victims back to life.
As it turned out, in this case even Buchdahl’s calls for balance were a form of misdirection. By the autumn of 2025, anyone seriously attentive to what was happening on “both sides” would have to acknowledge and reckon with the grotesquely escalating disproportion in the numbers of those displaced, maimed, and killed by the ongoing violence. Buchdahl declined to do so. And couched within her requests for empathy and understanding was a thinly disguised partisan message. In her confessional tone, she mused during her sermon that “I still struggle to find the emotional bandwidth to read the tragic stories coming out of Gaza . . . while calls to ‘blacklist Zionists’ or to ‘globalize the intifada’ still ring around the world, even in this city.”
With the New York City mayoral race just weeks away, it was hard not to hear this as a carefully placed swipe at that year’s Democratic Party nominee. When Buchdahl flew home from her book tour a few weeks later for the express purpose of commenting on the election, she made a point of stressing that “Central’s policy of non-endorsement is a principled stand which is important for the health of our country, our faith, and this congregation.” So she did not specifically tell the congregation to vote for Andrew Cuomo, to whose campaign and affiliated super PACs several of Central’s wealthiest members, including Bill Ackman and Ronald Lauder, had made massive donations. Instead, she simply reminded her congregants of what they already knew: “Candidate Zohran Mamdani has contributed to a mainstreaming of some of the most abhorrent antisemitism,” and “for so many in this community, this is reason enough to determine your vote unequivocally.” This was not an endorsement of one candidate and a denunciation of another — after all, there were other options on the ballot. Ackman himself may have proclaimed to his millions of followers on social media, “A vote for @CurtisSliwa is a vote for @ZohranKMamdani.” By contrast, Buchdahl noted that everyone listening could of course vote for Cuomo; but they remained perfectly free to support Mamdani, despite his role in creating “an atmosphere of denigration and ostracization of Jewish people everywhere” or “maybe even Sliwa,” who by that point had no statistical chance of winning the election. As she has explained in the months since, even in this “existential moment” her pastoral responsibilities as a rabbi of a “purple congregation” compelled her to transcend the political differences rending the fabric of Jewish unity.
The mayoral election demonstrated how much Buchdahl’s political trajectory has come to overlap with that of her billionaire congregants. But the ultimate issue is that as a national figure offering direction to the future of Reform Judaism, Buchdahl exhibits such an opportunistically selective commitment to even the blandest and most uncontroversial values she claims to espouse. The dreadful events of the past few years have indeed proven transformative for American Judaism. Out of the divisions Buchdahl so fears have emerged new Jewish communities of conscience that have stood together to condemn Israel’s killing spree in Gaza, marched in solidarity with the growing ranks of those targeted, dispossessed, and deported by Trump’s authoritarian regime, and, yes, voted to elect New York City’s first Muslim, South Asian mayor. It is not clear whether Buchdahl’s eagerness to disavow this growing multitude is an expression of ignorance or an unspoken excommunication. In the end, it doesn’t really matter. Fully one-third of Jewish New Yorkers who voted last November decided to back Zohran Mamdani. That a figure so preoccupied with her own status as a boundary crosser could insist on seeing no meaningful parallels between her own story and his is perhaps the truest guide to reading Buchdahl’s autobiography.
The wildly perverse irony here is that the more publicly any Jewish person acts in a manner consistent with antisemitic stereotypes, the more immune they seem to become from any legitimate criticism. So, for example, one of the wealthiest men in the world and his son, both of whom are Jewish, have formed one of the largest media conglomerates in the United States after merging Skydance Media with Paramount Global in 2025 and then purchasing Warner Bros. Discovery in 2026. With this empire, they are positioned to align entertainment and television news coverage with their stances on Israeli and American politics, particularly through their appointment of Bari Weiss as head of CBS News. But by Buchdahl’s reasoning, there is no way for anyone, Jewish or otherwise, to speak or write critically about what that might mean for journalism or democracy or geopolitics without engaging in antisemitism, precisely because Larry and David Ellison are Jews using their extreme wealth to control the media. ↩
