Wednesday, December 31, 2025

Reviewing 'Yes! I am Jewish,' Angela Buchdahl's life story | The Jerusalem Post

Reviewing 'Yes! I am Jewish,' Angela Buchdahl's life story | The Jerusalem Post


Jerusalem Post/Diaspora
'Yes! I am Jewish’: How a Jewish Korean princess was ordained as a rabbi - review
In her book Heart of a Stranger, Buchdahl tells the story of her life. She ends each chapter with a homily applying a sacred text to contemporary faith, values, and behavior.ANGELA BUCHDAHL in 2013. She was ordained as a cantor in 1999 at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion before going on to become a rabbi.(photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)ByGLENN C. ALTSCHULEROCTOBER 11, 2025 20:41

A few years ago, Angela Buchdahl was walking on the Upper West Side of Manhattan when a young boy in a black hat and suit, standing near a Chabad Lubavitcher “mitzvah tank,” approached her and asked, “Are you Jewish?”

“Yes!” Angela exclaimed. “I am Jewish.” Surprised perhaps by her exultant response, the boy shrugged, offered her a box of Shabbat candles, and walked off.

The daughter of Fred Warnick, a Jewish American, and Yi Sulija, a Korean Buddhist, Angela Buchdahl, the first Asian American ordained as a rabbi in North America, is the senior rabbi at Central Synagogue in New York City, a Reform congregation and one of the largest Jewish houses of worship in the world.

In her book Heart of a Stranger, Buchdahl tells the story of her life. She ends each chapter with a homily applying a sacred text to contemporary faith, values, and behavior. Her memoir is insightful, passionate, learned, and luminous.

PROF. LEE SEUNG-JAE (center) at Seoul National University of Science and Technology, South Korea, last year. Buchdahl sang in Hebrew and Korean at the inauguration of the university’s and the nation’s first Israel Education Center. (credit: Kim Soo-hyeon/Reuters)Born in Korea, Buchdahl arrived in Tacoma, Washington, with her parents and her sister in 1977 at the age of five. Related Articles


The family chose Judaism for the girls because Sulija believed that membership in Temple Beth El would connect them to their father’s extended family and the larger community. Nonetheless, “as if to convince himself,” Warnick constantly told his daughters they were 100% Jewish, 100% Korean, and 100% American.
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Sulija took Hebrew classes, sang in the synagogue choir, and prepared wontons for Shabbat. She didn’t convert to Judaism because members of the congregation, though friendly, “never quite treated her as one of them.”

Buchdahl viewed herself as a “spiritual mutt.” At her bat mitzvah, she vowed to protect and pass on her religious inheritance. She subsequently learned, from the story of a hassidic rabbi named Zusya, that the root of the Hebrew word for “identity” is zehut (“this”). And as the only version of “this,” each one of us should embrace our identity and not ask why we aren’t “that.”

Painfully aware that, apart from inside “a Reform bubble,” most Jews use matrilineal descent to establish Jewish identity, Buchdahl initially rejected conversion as an insult to someone who had been a Jew for her entire life. While an undergraduate at Yale University, however, she embraced giyur (conversion) as an acknowledgment of the Judaism that had always been inside her.

To become a Jew in the eyes of most Orthodox Jews, she agreed as well to seek the approval of a beit din (a Jewish court of law) and immerse herself in a mikveh (ritual bath).

In 1999, Buchdahl was ordained as a cantor by the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, and as a rabbi in 2001.

She took a position as assistant rabbi and cantor in the Westchester Reform Temple in 2003, married Jacob Buchdahl in 2005, and moved to Central Synagogue in 2006. In the ensuing years, she felt guilty about not connecting her children to their Korean heritage or to the large Korean community in New York City.
Rediscovering her rootsThat changed in 2012, after Buchdahl appeared on the PBS television program Finding Your Roots, hosted by Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Gates provided information about Buchdahl’s ancestors in Romania, the ship that took them to Ellis Island in 1902, and the antisemitism that had prompted them to leave their homeland. But the “big reveal” came when Gates traced her maternal line back to King Sejong the Great. “The rumor is true,” Buchdahl joked to her mother. “I’m a Jewish Korean princess.”

The connection was reinforced with a family trip to Korea later that year.

Heart of a Stranger supplements Buchdahl ’s personal story with more general observations about identity politics. After noting that seven million American Jews are not white, Buchdahl recommends rethinking “tribal racial notions of Jewish peoplehood.”

She also relates her own experiences with sexism. Congregants, and even the rabbi in Westchester, she reveals, wondered aloud whether she could handle the job at Central Synagogue while raising three children.

Humility, she writes, is especially challenging for female leaders, who are perceived as arrogant, bossy, or excessively ambitious when claiming a place at the table, attempting to change policies, or expecting to be heard.

Citing two Hebrew midwives and Queen Esther as examples, Buchdahl asserts that “false modesty can be irresponsible – or even a betrayal.”

Buchdahl’s homilies contain kernels of wisdom on a wide array of subjects. Often translated as “faith,” the Hebrew word emunah she suggests, is better understood as “trust.” More than faith, a noun, something you can have, trust, a verb, is put into practice by Abraham when he leaves his home, counts the stars (to learn how many offspring he will have), and brings his son Isaac to the mountain.

The Kabbala, she reveals, offers an alternative to the standard creation narrative. Because God is everywhere, He contracts, creates darkness, and pours light into 10 vessels, which shatter in response to the primordial energy.

She points out that God created human beings to “gather the sparks.” Our task, then, is to realize that brokenness, not perfection, is our inheritance. That’s why the shofar call shvarim means “breaks.” And perhaps why the Yiddish word krechtz, “a sigh, groan, or plaintive plea,” is a quintessential Jewish expression of sorrow and the capacity to survive it.

Heart of a Stranger concludes with a dramatically different expression: anguish at the Oct. 7 mega-attack by Hamas terrorists and its aftermath.

Buchdahl cried “over lost lives, children held captive, young soldiers risking their lives to defend their country.” The conflict, she writes, “reduced all nuance to rubble” amid an alarming absence of listening and compassion.

“I don’t have God’s power to see. Or to know,” she told members of her congregation. But when asked what God would want her to do, she knew the answer: Work toward peace, even if doing so seems “unwise, unschooled, naive.” But this is when faith comes in.

“Not a blind faith but trusting in an outcome for which there is no alternative, taking even the smallest steps to bring it about and not losing hope that it is still within reach.”

In a small step to that end, Buchdahl flew to Korea in the summer of 2024 to mark the opening at the Seoul National University of the nation’s first Israel Education Center. She ended her remarks by singing “Yerushalayim Shel Zahav” and “Arirang,” a Korean folk tune: songs of “resilience against all probability, each the requiem of a buffeted people, ringing out into the hall – and, just maybe, into a gentler new day.” 

The reviewer is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin 
Emeritus Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.

HEART OF A STRANGERAN UNLIKELY RABBI’S STORYOF FAITH, IDENTITY, AND BELONGING By Angela Buchdahl Viking 352 pages; $32
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'Why Choose This Fight?' How the Daughter of a Korean-Buddhist Became One of America's Most Distinguished Rabbis - Jewish World

'Why Choose This Fight?' How the Daughter of a Korean-Buddhist Became One of America's Most Distinguished Rabbis - Jewish World

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Ivy League Exodus - Arts & Letters - Tablet Magazine

Ivy League Exodus - Arts & Letters - Tablet Magazine

Ivy League Exodus
The number of Jews on major Ivy League campuses has been cut in half or more over the past decade by new elite doctrines that downplay merit in favor of amorphous definitions of ‘diversity’ and ‘privilege.’ But one Ivy may be bucking the trend.byArmin Rosen
April 19, 2023
Brown University, Providence, Rhode IslandLane Turner/The Boston Globe via Getty Images


Kemp Mill Synagogue is a spiritual home to lobbyists, policy scholars, and White House staffers. It looks out over the opening of a lushly wooded forest valley in suburban Maryland, just down the street from a horse farm. One of its common nicknames used to be Congregation Bnei Ivy—the people of the Ivy League.


The name alludes to an enduring way of life for an influential segment of American Jews. The eight Ivy League schools are a collective stand-in for the meritocratic system that turned the children and grandchildren of penniless Yiddish-speakers into some of the richest and most important people in America. In Kemp Mill Synagogue’s case, it really did seem as if everyone there had gone to an Ivy League school, or had sent several of their children to one. But that was almost a generation ago. “I’m not sure the nickname fits anymore,” said Tevi Troy, a congregant, historian, Cornell alumnus, and former Bush administration official.

For Jews, an Ivy League degree was both a status symbol and a crucial element in a functioning and merit-based system of social mobility. An Ivy education was proof of a durable theory that Jews—like other immigrant communities—could become normalized in American society through sheer ability, which could be recognized, nurtured, and rewarded through institutions that everyone still trusted and even admired. Like other elite realms, the Ivies became places where Jews were numerous and comfortable. Some 25% of the Harvard student body was Jewish from the 1960s onward. Yale was perhaps as much as one-third Jewish in the ’70s and ’80s. The University of Pennsylvania was always mythologized as being 40% or even a half Jewish, though the best numbers indicate the high-water mark was more in the 35% range. In a 1979 address at the dedication of Harvard’s new Hillel, Henry Rosovsky, dean of the faculty of arts and sciences and one of the architects of the college’s core curriculum, noted that “Harvard has made us feel entirely at home,” but also wondered: “Will our community remain strong or will it disappear? This is not a fanciful question.”


Today, it has become a perceivable reality that Jews are no longer being admitted to Ivy League schools in their former numbers. In 2017, Brandeis demographer Leonard Saxe found that Harvard was at most 14% Jewish, determining that the undergraduate student body was 10% “Jewish by religion,” while another 4% were people of Jewish ethnicity who did not identify as belonging to any religion. At Harvard the drop has been noted since at least the late 2000s, when the university’s Jewish studies department began cutting its offerings. Princeton, believed to be 15% Jewish in the ’80s and ’90s, now only infrequently has classes on modern Jewish philosophy and usually has only one class per semester on modern Jewish history. Students interested in Hebrew language instruction must often take more advanced classes at the nearby Princeton Theological Seminary, which runs on a different academic calendar. “I think there are a number of reasons why JDS is not flourishing at Princeton,” emeritus professor Froma Zeitlin wrote by email, referring to the school’s Judaic studies program, “one of which is the lack of a coherent vision as to what JDS ought to be promoting.”

The University of Pennsylvania was believed to be over one-third Jewish for much of the ’80s and ’90s. In 2016, Saxe put the number at closer to 16%. The drop at Penn was “dramatic and rapid” in the 2010s, as one person active in the university’s Jewish life recalled—there was an apparent 40% plunge in the school’s Jewish population between 2010 and the study’s completion in 2016, with a 50% drop from the beginning of the 21st century until now. The Yale Chaplain’s Office surveys incoming freshmen on their religious identity. The office’s methods are notably unsystematic, but it nevertheless recorded a drop in Jewish-identifying respondents, from 19.8% in the 2000s to 16.4% in the 2010s. Yale is now “probably less than 10% Jewish,” one leader of the university’s Jewish community estimated. At Princeton, members of the Orthodox community—the group most responsible for making Jewish practice and communal life both visible and tangible, often to the benefit of less religious Jews—aren’t sure how much longer their daily minyan can hang on. “Jews are being squeezed out of the admission priorities,” Princeton senior Adam Hoffman claimed.

Of course, there is little about American Jewish life that depends on there being high percentages of Jews at the eight Ivy League schools. Jews being rejected from Penn and Yale are now flocking to Washington University in St Louis or Tulane instead. Perhaps steering clear of the establishment conformity factories that most Ivy League universities seem bent on becoming might actually turn into an advantage for American Jews within a burnt-over educational landscape where “excellence” is thought of as a retrograde or even racist concept. The faster Jews can run away from the declining strongholds of rigidly enforced right-think, one might argue, the better off they and their children will be.


At every point in their history the Ivies have revealed what the existing elite values and whom it is willing to welcome into its ranks.

Whether or not it’s ultimately positive for the community, the drop in Jewish Ivy League enrollment reflects consequential shifts within institutions that continue to sit atop American society, retaining the privileges and broader infrastructure of the prior meritocracy. These universities, which continue to subsist on large contributions from mainly Jewish donors, still behave as if they control a narrow pathway into the upper rungs of American life.

At every point in their history the Ivies have revealed what the existing elite values and whom it is willing to welcome into its ranks. Jews benefited from the meritocratic system of elite production that the Ivies administered in the postwar years and are at an apparent disadvantage now that the old system is considered exclusionary, unrepresentative, and otherwise ill-suited to the current needs and values of the people oveerseeing it. The Ivy League now presents conflicting answers as to whether Jews have a place within whatever post-meritocratic national elite the schools understand themselves to be building.

American Jews—at least the wealthy and relatively liberal ones who cluster in the Northeast—achieved their present status through a mid-to-late-20th-century credentialing system that tried and failed to exclude them. From the 1920s until the early 1960s, Yale’s administration implemented a series of secret admissions rules that had the effect of keeping the Jewish percentage of the student body at a consistent 10%. “They publicly said, and said it to themselves: We are not discriminating against Jews per se. We’re just trying to set up criteria so that the Jews we bring in will be the right kind of Jews,” said Daniel Oren, a psychologist and author of a book about the history of Jews at Yale. Harvard officially admitted to having a quota system in the early 1920s. In research for a 2017 senior thesis on the history of Jews at Dartmouth, Sandor Farkas found evidence that the school’s quotas on Jewish admissions lasted through the 1960s.






Aspects of the quotas have lingered on—it is harder for just about any student from the Northeast not classified as a racial minority, including Jews, to get into Harvard than it is for one applying from Iowa or Nebraska. But beginning in the mid ’60s, Jews were the primary beneficiaries of a half-century window in which the path to the Ivy League became reasonably straightforward: Excellent grades and a high SAT score could get you into a place like Penn, which had a 41% acceptance rate in 1990. That window is now just about closed. Unlike in the ’90s, the Ivies now solicit a high volume of applicants, and it has become harder to establish variance across the applicant pool than it was in past decades. Deliberate, systematic grade and SAT-score inflation have obliterated any obvious quantitative differences between students who are truly great and those who are merely very good. Earlier this year, Columbia became the first Ivy League school to drop its SAT requirement entirely. With the end of the last comparatively objective means of evaluating applicants, admissions criteria have become “holistic” and hard to even identify.






There is compelling though occasional anecdotal proof that top students are clustering in those schools that do continue to select on merit: 21 of the 25 top finishers in last year’s William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition were MIT students. Such proof isn’t needed though, because the Ivies openly and proudly admit that they are no longer taking the top applicants: “If we wanted to, we could take students who had only perfect GPAs and only perfect board scores and fill a class with them,” Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber told CBS in 2017, before confirming that “we do take race and ethnicity into account in building a diverse campus.” Harvard is currently the defendant in a Supreme Court case in which the university is arguing for its right to continue assessing applicants based on their ethnic background, anticipated personality traits, and other factors that have little to with the usual notions of academic merit. “Yale will not waver in its commitment to educating a student body whose diversity is a mark of its excellence,” Yale President Peter Solovay wrote in 2020, arguing that Yale retains its status as a top school as a result of its admissions office’s skill at demographic engineering.






In practice, the commitment to diversity, which the Ivies view as part of their larger mission to improve society, is reflected in drop-offs in the white percentage of student bodies. “Jews are de facto discriminated against, even if it’s not based on animus” a nationally renowned mathematician employed at an Ivy League school said of Jewish applicants to top colleges. “The counterargument is that they’re discriminated against the same way any other white person in the Northeast whose parents went to top schools are discriminated against.”










This “discrimination” against Jewish applicants isn’t narrowly the result of affirmative action, at least not in the sense of the redistribution of benefits, like elite university admissions, as a way of rectifying historical wrongdoing. Instead, the muddling of admission standards under the sign of social justice is an expression of a deeper and much older mentality among the Ivy administrations, one that predates affirmative action by decades or even centuries. The Ivy League schools are jealously protective of their self-image as the vanguard of the national elite—a self-appointed purpose that was always the sole determinant of whether Jews or any other demographic group would be admitted in large numbers. The Ivies operate like rentier states whose legitimacy depends on the wise dispersal of a lucrative and diminishing resource. In Ivy League administrations, that resource is prestige.






Toward the middle of the 20th century, after decades of trying and failing to maintain their status as exclusionary clubs for monied Northeastern men, the times called for the prestige-supply of the Ivies to be distributed among the best and most qualified students—male and female, gentile and Jewish—in order for the Ivies to credibly retain their gatekeeping role. Conversely, in the 2020s, another period of social upheaval, excellence has gone out of fashion among an elite whose new watchword is “equity.” Given that Jews are less than 2% of the U.S. population, harsher and even more significant reductions in already-declining Jewish undergraduate populations at the Ivies would be necessary in order for closely curated student bodies to “look like America.”






In their implementation, the Ivies’ attempts at demographic engineering have little to do with any clear idea of either merit or justice. Indeed, if historical wrongdoing was the core issue, it would be hard to find a group in America that was explicitly targeted for exclusion for longer and to greater effect than Jews, including by the Ivies themselves. Instead, the Ivy student bodies reveal the absurdity of present efforts to equitably distribute prestige in an increasingly unequal society. At Penn, the percentage of Black students barely changed between 2010 and 2016, a time when the Jewish population sharply declined. The percentage of Asians and international students markedly rose—along with the average income of families sending their kids to Penn. “The admissions data allowed Penn to virtue-signal that it was doing something for diversity,” said one source familiar with Jewish life at the school. “But what it really was doing was swapping out wealthy Jews for wealthy Asians.” This was partly enabled through an initiative to prioritize “first generation” college students in admissions. But the university employs a tortured definition of “first generation,” one that allows it to create the illusion of greater equity without risking its academic reputation or its bottom line: At Penn, a “first generation” applicant includes people whose parents earned college degrees outside the United States—the children of nearly anyone who immigrated to the U.S. with a degree, no matter how rich or poor—or who did not “attend a research university with the resources and opportunities a Penn education provides.”


The gap between the ideal of representation and its practical, real-world outcomes frequently manifests itself at elite universities. In 2004, Henry Louis Gates Jr. estimated that between two-thirds and one-half of Black students at Harvard were immigrants or the children of immigrants, rather than the descendants of American slaves. Apparently, little has changed since then: “To be a descendant of slavery is to be an ‘other’ within the Black community at Harvard,” one student wrote in a February Crimson column. The writer noted that in 2015, the median income of U.S.-born Black households was about 30% lower than that of Black immigrant households. Harvard figured out that it could appear to be helping the primary victims of American racism by accepting the high-achieving children of relatively wealthy African professionals.



With a similar eye toward establishing diversity without threatening the finances or reputation of the institution, international students now account for over 10% of Ivy League student bodies. These students are often the private school educated children of foreign elites whose parents or national governments are happy to pay the entire tuition bill, eschewing the financial aid that would be necessary for the children of poor, native-born minority groups to attend. “You get extremely wealthy people from abroad who pay full freight—that’s the only demographic at Penn that’s gotten bigger in this time period,” one alumnus active in Jewish life at the university explained.





The Ivies’ efforts to protect their constantly endangered position as America’s defining pathway to power and success has resulted in the schools’ obscuring any clear criteria for admissions, with the effect of winnowing its Jewish students without seeming to have achieved any higher social objective. The picture will become even more confused if and when the Supreme Court rules in favor of the Asian American plaintiffs suing Harvard for discrimination, a decision that would prohibit the use of race in college admissions, thus forcing the schools into ever more absurdist, arbitrary, and very likely secretive means of maintaining “diverse” student bodies.







In the post-meritocratic environment, Jewish applicants and alumni have been forced to prove that they are beneficial to the Ivy League prestige cartel for reasons that go beyond their brainpower or potential as future donors. There are now various examples of what this advocacy looks like in practice. On Feb. 23, the University of Pennsylvania’s Hillel held a Zoom call for parents and alumni from the school’s Orthodox community addressing the “serious decline in Jewish population and concomitant decline in the Orthodox and traditionally observant community” over “the past 15 years.” The notice for the meeting, signed by Hillel Director Gabe Greenberg, added that Penn Hillel had “begun a process of educating the University on this critical issue.” The call would be part of this ongoing “process,” a chance to lay out the terms of the problem in a way that might receive a sympathetic hearing from Penn’s administration.



“People were very upset,” recalls one participant in the call. The roughly 100 people on the line proposed ideas about how to approach university administrators: Perhaps they could argue that a smaller Jewish community would put additional mental health pressures on the existing Jews on campus. Maybe by getting more specific admissions data from Jewish day schools college counselors could help bolster the argument that Orthodox Jews no longer saw Penn as the place to use their single early admissions application.



“There used to be a playbook of what you were supposed to do to lobby the university,” said one source familiar with Jewish communal affairs at Penn. “The reason you should want a sizable Jewish community is that it’s good for the university. There used to be this line of, show me a university with less than 15% Jews and I’ll show you a mediocre university.” That line no longer works, but as the Zoom call shows, no one seems sure how universities with an obscure commitment to academic excellence and which define Jews as an overrepresented subgroup of “white” people can be convinced to let in more Jews, rather than, say, wealthy Chinese or Nigerian applicants.





There’s a similar lack of clarity at Princeton, where there is rising concern over the near-term viability of the school’s religious community. The number of incoming Orthodox Jewish students has apparently declined even as the school expanded its available admissions spots. Yavne, the university’s Orthodox student organization, could identify fewer than 10 potential observant Jews in incoming classes that are at least 125 students larger than in past years, thanks to an ongoing enlargement of Princeton College. Major Jewish donors have met with Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber to discuss the perceived decline in Jewish enrollment. Student leadership from Yavne has met with admissions officials to raise their doubts over whether the school’s once-vibrant Orthodox community can last.





In some sense, unease over the disappearance of Jews from Ivy League campuses is disconnected from any actual numbers, which the universities themselves may or may not formally keep. Myles McKnight, a Princeton senior active in Yavne, explained to me that there are tensions within the Princeton Jewish community, with frequent Israel-related uproars and a growing perception that the university’s Center for Jewish Life isn’t supportive of the more traditionally minded side of the community. “There is a sense that the CJL is quickly becoming another social justice center on campus,” said McKnight. Yet it is possible Jews on campus are experiencing their own specific consequences of a general atmosphere of drift. I asked McKnight about the overall feeling on campus and received a discouraging reply. “Obviously there’s a huge mental health crisis,” he explained. “I think people are a lot more detached in general from the overall purpose and mission of the university as a place of study and learning, and more so regard this place as an empty steppingstone to a job in consulting or a job on Capitol Hill or something.”



Versions of this story crop up across the Ivy League, with the takeaway that life on campus is transactional and status-obsessed, and breeds a particularly sour kind of cynicism. “The hyperwoke environment there in general is not a friendly one for the Jews,” said a recent Yale graduate, “and certainly drives many of them to leftist politics as a matter of seeking out personal safety, even if only subconsciously.”



The eight Ivy League schools do not march in lockstep. Even if the universities are guided by a similar set of values and interests, they are still competitors within a uniquely American marketplace, jostling for a limited pool of resources, attention, and status. A decision made at Yale or Havard creates a chance for differentiation somewhere else. Even within the Ivy League there is already a compelling example of what an elite university eager to welcome Jews on campus might look like.



The percentage of Jews at Brown is reportedly going up: from 15% in 2015 to 24% in 2022, according to the nonscientific count in Hillel’s college guide, which is based on self-reported numbers supplied by the various campus Hillels. There are also other, perhaps even more reliable signs of an increase: A vastly expanded eruv opened in College Hill in 2017. The kosher dining hall will move to the main dining hall on campus next year. “It’s going to be amazingly positive for the student experience here at Brown,” George Barboza, vice president for dining programs, said when the news was announced. “This really allows for a robust community where students of many religious backgrounds and ethnicities can get good meals and share them in a dining hall, without the restriction of having to eat certain meals in particular places or at certain times.”



Where in the past couple of decades Penn has gone from having two daily Orthodox minyans to just one, Brown might soon have its first daily minyan in recent memory. There are students “experimenting with a Thursday morning minyan,” reports Brown Hillel Director Joshua Bolton, in addition to the Orthodox services held on Shabbat and Rosh Chodesh. “Once you get a minyan, that’s a major fact on the ground,” said Bolton, who adds that he’s observed a gradual increase in day school graduates attending Brown. “Over the past decade the infrastructure to support Orthodox observant Jewish life has dramatically improved,” he said.



It is possible Brown sees an opportunity in the decline of day school admissions at the other Ivies—by rapidly building up its infrastructure for religious Jews, Brown can enroll the talented Orthodox students that Penn and Harvard no longer seem to want.



There are signs that Brown’s approach may be less cynical than that. Christina Paxson, the university’s president since 2012, has repeatedly spoken about the importance of having religious Jews on campus. In 2017, Paxson, a noted academic economist and convert to Judaism, addressed the dedication of Brown’s eruv expansion, making her perhaps the only American college president in history to have appeared at such an esoteric Jewish event. Her remarks showed that she did not consider a physical marker determining what religious Jews can and can’t carry one-seventh of the week to be the least bit esoteric. “God’s presence is reflected across the public good, in many beautiful and meaningful ways, and I think what we’re doing here adds to that,” Paxson said, closing a speech in which she suggested that the new eruv was an expression of “community-based diversity and tolerance.” Paxson, Bolton explains, publicly lights Rosh Hashanah candles at Hillel every year, which is something much different and more deliberate than an annual photo-op with a Hanukkah menorah.



Like her counterparts at Princeton and Yale, Paxson is an outspoken advocate of demographic management of the student body. She wants students of atypical Ivy League backgrounds on campus; more students who grew up on army bases, or in tightknit Christian communities. Her vision of a balanced campus requires a Jewish presence, along with a kind of Jewish confidence and vibrancy that other universities now appear to discourage—Paxon also addressed Hillel International’s Israel summit earlier this year, for instance.



Paxson’s position as president of Brown was hardly inevitable. The head of the search committee that selected Paxson was Tom Tisch, an investor and veteran donor to Jewish causes. The Brown board now includes Mitchell Julis, namesake benefactor of the Israeli and Jewish law program at Harvard Law and a former member of the Princeton board.

The notion of Jews as one of many ethnic constituencies competing for the attention of the people who run the country’s prestige dispensaries is hardly an encouraging one. But a principled rejection of the post-meritocratic system may not be practical, and it is not too late for Jews to carve out a space within the new and bewildering vacuum that is consuming the American elite, the Ivy League included.



Armin Rosen is a staff writer for Tablet Magazine.


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Sunday, December 28, 2025

The Korean Women's Association has been Improving Lives and Bringing People Together for 50 Years

News & Updates - TACOMA-PIERCE COUNTY CHAMBER


The Korean Women's Association has been Improving Lives and Bringing People Together for 50 Years


[8/15/22] For the Korean Women's Association, the sky is the limit. They are a non-profit organization that provides services to all of Western Washington. They currently operate 15 offices in 17 counties and employ over 1,500 workers to serve more than 10,000 clients every year. And they're still growing. This year, they are celebrating 50 years of making a difference in the lives of vulnerable immigrants, families, and seniors. Before growing into the organization they are today, however, the Korean Women's Association started off as one woman's idea to bring together other women like herself and find community amongst loneliness. ​



A map showing the counties where KWA currently operates lit up, and spaces for their work to expand.

KWA: "We Serve All People."

In the early 1970s, Kim Nam Hui was living in Pierce County as a Korean immigrant wife of a U.S. serviceman. Living in an area without a strongly-established Korean cultural presence yet, Kim began hosting gatherings of other Korean wives to share food, stories, and support.

Though its beginnings were humble, the Korean Women Association's (KWA) ambitions were not. The group of women soon began providing support services within their community. These included domestic violence counseling, immigration services, and transportation and translation assistance.

KWA began its fundraising efforts by selling food to area residents and soliciting donations from local businesses. Soon, however, the group realized that to fully achieve their goals, they would need to do more. In 1979, KWA officially became a non-profit organization. That same year, they received their first grant from the State of Washington.

As the organization grew, so did the variety of needs of its clients.

Now, KWA offers everything from in-home care to affordable housing; meal assistance to health screenings.

KWA provides services to more than 10,000 clients every year. While the organization began as a space for Korean women immigrants, they now serve a diverse group of individuals in need of assistance. KWA's mission is to "provide multi-cultural, multi-lingual human services, regardless of race or ethnic background, to diverse communities through education, socialization, advocacy, and support."

​These days, one of their biggest areas of support is for seniors. KWA's in-home care program exists to give seniors, as well as individuals with disabilities, the option to age in place and remain independent. In order to accomplish this, KWA employs thousands of professional caregivers to help tend to individuals' needs in daily life. Not only does this improve the lives of the many people it serves, it creates jobs and opportunities that benefit Western Washington communities and the local economy.

KWA's domestic violence programs, one of the critical services they have offered from the beginning, are still going strong today and changing lives for countless individuals and families in our community. They operate a 24-hour crisis hotline, intervention and planning assistance, rapid rehousing for survivors, and so much more. In addition to helping intervene in crises, KWA also offers prevention programs including small group workshops and community education presentations.

Another big part of KWA's focus is its affordable housing options in communities throughout Western Washington. They currently offer five affordable housing properties in total: three senior housing options and two low-income housing options. These options are life-changing opportunities for community members in need of safe, affordable places to live. KWA's mission to provide affordable housing in the area continues to grow. Just this past May, they received $36 million in funding to develop more housing in downtown Tacoma.


KWA joined by U.S. Representative Derek Kilmer to celebrate bringing more affordable housing to Tacoma. (Photo courtesy of KWA)



KWA's first housing property, Pacific Villa, established in 1998.

KWA's most recent housing property, Senior City, established in 2009.

As members of the Tacoma-Pierce County Chamber, KWA is also closely connected with the local business community. They have played an important role throughout the COVID-19 pandemic helping small businesses survive and prosper. They were selected by Pierce County Economic Development Services to provide small business navigation services for limited English proficiency Asian American business owners. They have been partners in the ambitious Pierce County Business Accelerator, a program of the Pierce County Economic Development Department administered by the Tacoma-Pierce County Chamber. KWA worked with these partners to facilitate cohort 3 of the Pierce County Business Accelerator, which was composed entirely of Asian-American small business owners. This cohort graduated the program in February 2022 and have gone on to do great things in our business community.​

KWA receiving the 2022 Spotlight On Business Award for a non-profit.
KWA was awarded the Tacoma-Pierce County Chamber's Spotlight On Business Award this year in the non-profit category for all the incredible work they do in Pierce County and beyond.

The momentum of the Korean Women's Association is something of a marvel. Throughout fifty years of service, they have shown a remarkable ability to adapt to the most pressing needs of underserved and vulnerable groups. It is exciting to imagine, and be a part of, whatever future endeavors they bring to our community. ​
This Member Feature story is part of a series by the Tacoma-Pierce County Chamber to promote stronger connections and increased engagement between the Chamber, its members, and the local business community. Member stories are non-promotional opportunities to share members' business stories with the community. If you are a Chamber member interested in being featured for a story, please contact Digital Marketing Outreach Coordinator Audrey Widner at audreyw@tacomachamber.org




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A Korean Jewish Rabbi?! 세계 가장 큰 유대교 회당 랍비가 한국계?!


Diaspora Film Production 디아스포라 필름
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35,272 views  Apr 15, 2020  #Arirang #Diaspora #Rabbi
Angela Warnick Buchdahl is an American rabbi. She is the first female and Asian-American to be ordained as both a rabbi and cantor anywhere in the world. She was born in South Korea under Korean mother and Jewish father.
She is a Senior Rabbi at Central Synagogue in New York City, one of the largest Jewish synagogues in the World.

엔젤라 워닉 북달 랍비는 뉴욕 센트럴 시나고그 (회당)의 수석 랍비로 여성으로서, 그리고 아시안계로서 랍비와 선창자 (칸토르)로 임명된 세계 첫 사례이다. 그녀는 한국 어머니와 유대인 아버지 사이에서 태어난 한국 출생자이다.
==

영상제작자: 이 영상을 만든 이유는 유대인으로, 또 한인으로 그녀가 갖고 있는 정체성에 대해 탐구하기 위해서이다. 과연 유대인 디아스포라의 정체성이 무엇인지, 한인 디아스포라의 정체성이 무엇인지, 그것을 확립하고 보존해야하는 당위성이 무엇인지, 그녀의 입을 통해 들어보고 싶었다.

#KoreanDiaspora #JewishDiaspora #Rabbi #Arirang #Identity #Diaspora
#DiasporaFilmProduction
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Transcript


I grew up Korean but I was Jewish but
all my and my mother was Buddhist but my
emos were Trisha so like it was like
I'd now like to invite rabbi Angela book
doll from Manhattan to lead us lessons
and candle lighting rabbi Thank You mr.
president I'm tremendously honored to be
here with you and with mrs. Obama I
would say that our founding fathers they
wanted an aspire to build a country that
was truly a place of religious freedom
and equal opportunity for all people but
I have to predict that they could not
have imagined that in 2014 that there
would be a female asian-american rabbi
lighting the menorah at the White House
for an african-american president
[Applause]
[Music]
[Music]
I check it Chandra me it's gone ha ha ha
[Music]
my mom would be very proud that I'm here
speaking as a hyung go set him so as you
heard I was born between two worlds in
an army base hospital in near Seoul and
I have this Korean Buddhist mother she
was actually born in Japan but moved to
Korea when she was about five and my
Jewish father my mom was an English
major at ey University and my father did
ROTC and was stationed in South Korea so
that's how they met and then eventually
got married I had my first four and a
half years I lived in Korea speaking
only Korean I lived with my hominid and
my parents and a lot of cousins but is
not very easy to be a half-breed in
Korea in the the Hermit Kingdom and not
only that there's a lot of prejudice in
particular for like American Korean
mixed children and and there was no
Jewish community at all so for all of
these reasons at five basically we moved
to Tacoma Washington which is where my
father's family was from the irony is
they moved to Tacoma which actually has
a bigger Korean population than Jewish
population that was very lucky for my
mom because she got very very deeply
involved in the Korean community there
my emos we brought over two of my emos
to America to Tacoma they all lived in
my house first you know how that goes
for Koreans you know I lived in my house
for six months and then they moved to
their own house like my emos when they
came they were all everyone was raised
Buddhists but they all got deeply
involved in the Korean church community
as a social outlet and then each of them
converted to Christianity one of them my
aunt became truly like born-again and
she became a Korean minister and so
she's still very active as a Korean
minister and had a small Korean church
so you can imagine what it was like for
me I grew up Korean but I was Jewish but
all my and my mother was Buddhist but my
emos were Christian so like it was like
it was like a I was a religious studies
major cuz it was a form of therapy for
me so like you know I had to learn like
what was going on now you can take my
mother out of Korea but you can't take
the Korean out of my mother she was a
tiger mom before that like term was
coined she made me take piano lessons at
the age of five
she had a very strong kind of almost
impossible work ethic she taught me to
live with a lot of respect and deference
for elders very important she like
drilled that into us that this was the
key to everything was education and
luckily Jewish and Korean values are
very similar especially around these
ideas around education and how we think
about our tradition and preserving
tradition and all of those things
sometimes there were times where I felt
like I didn't belong anywhere and
instead my mom you know kind of
encouraged me to think of the fact that
I could belong everywhere and I could
take the best of my Korean side and the
best of my Jewish side so I do think I
have a really strong sense of deference
and loyalty to my parents and a sense of
respect for elders and a part of me that
also probably what allowed me to say at
age 16 when someone told me I wasn't
Jewish when I was on an Israel trip it
was the first time I went to Israel was
the first time I met Jews who were much
more traditional than I were and they
said if you don't have a Jewish mother
that's how Jewish law traces your
identity so they said you're not
actually a Jew I mean I don't have a
Jewish name Angela I don't have a Jewish
face I said I could just stop being
Jewish right now like and no one would
even notice I think that the part of me
that was Jewish instead of sort of like
ascribing to that was like oh I'll show
you how to do a shame I'm gonna become a
rabbi and I came home from that trip and
I told my mom that I wanted to be a
rabbi and she knew how much pain I had
been through in my Israel trip like how
I felt rejected by fellow Jews on my
trip how I felt inauthentic as a Jew and
by the way that identity crisis like
lasted for quite a while I remember
telling my mom I wanted to be a rabbi
and she just she's not the kind of
person who cries but she teared up and
she just said why do you want to put
yourself through that like why do you
want to put yourself into a community
that's just gonna that has rejected me
like this and it wasn't until she sort
of challenged me that I realized that
being Jewish was is much who I was and I
could no sooner stop doing that than
stop being a woman or stop being Korean
or I'm stop being who I was so I'm just
gonna fast-forward and say that like
there's a long line between age 16 when
I wanted to be a rabbi
to New York where I came to central
synagogue but I will say that in 2014 I
took my place leading this congregation
which is now 2600 families with 7,000
people big it's the largest synagogue in
New York and one of the three largest
synagogues in the world and I'm the only
woman leading any synagogue that's this
big and I'm a Korean kind of crazy
[Music]
if he knew you
the key news soon
[Music]
Oh
[Music]
because Jews especially because we have
been ad I ask for people for 2,000 years
you can't pin us down into one ethnic
group or one race so the idea that
you're a race is almost always gonna be
used against you in some bad way and
it's not the identifiers and so for me I
had trouble though because I didn't look
Jewish in the kind of an American
mainstream white way and that would
always be you know a problem in terms of
people's kind of relationship with me
especially when I was younger and
probably my own sense of like fitting in
people say though if we're not a people
hood and if I don't really believe in
the religion then what binds us together
and that's a really key question like
you probably asked that as Koreans -
like okay so we're not living in Korea
anymore
is it just a bloodline is it just the
way I look is there something real that
like actually draws and binds us all
together and what is the substance of
that so on the one hand one of the
things we talk about all the time
there's this phrase from the Jewish
Talmud called that says every Jew is
responsible for one another meaning that
like we really do feel that we are one
community or one people that are spread
around the world but we are united and
we're responsible for one another and
we're connected in some way when I think
about it now I think you want to get to
something more substantive so part of
what I think about a lot is like how do
we make it more than just like you know
all we share is a Korean food or a
Jewish food or something that's very
surface how do you get to something
deeper like I feel like we really need
that Jewish idea right now and so one of
the things we talk about is like these
are these are qualities that you
recognize in Jews around the world like
countercultural it's iconoclastic it
reverses the the norms of structure and
hierarchy that is like built into the
culture so I think that those pieces
that's the kind of stuff that I think
you can build a connection on something
real that's worth preserving I think all
the time like I'm not here to preserve
Judaism just for its own sake I want to
preserve it because there's something
worth preserving like I think there's
something that Judaism brings to the
world that is powerful that I find so
meaningful that like I really want my
children and other people to learn it so
we have to think about that with Korean
culture as well there are things about
Korean culture and the go beyond that
the surface stuff that are deep and
power
well that's the stuff we want to
preserve that's what we want to share
that should be what connects me to
someone who's in Korea that that I think
is we want to get to that higher level
of like the deep values that bind us
together as a community we're gonna sing
a do die I'm super proud of being Korean
oh I'm gonna get all no
Morgan de bourree Gaga C Neiman
and she need or more gas or Bible and ah
A Korean Jewish Rabbi?! 세계 가장 큰 유대교 회당 랍비가 한국계?!


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NYC's Jewish community divided over Israel critic Mamdani | AP News

NYC's Jewish community divided over Israel critic Mamdani | AP News



New York’s Jewish community divided, anxious over Mamdani, an Israel critic


BY DAVID CRARY AND PETER SMITH
Updated 10:47 AM GMT+10:30, November 4, 2025


NEW YORK (AP) — New York City’s Jewish community — the largest in the United States — abounds with anxiety and friction a day ahead of an election that could give the city its first Muslim mayor.

That candidate, Zohran Mamdani, has won over many progressive Jewish voters with vows to make the city more affordable and equitable. Yet he has alarmed many other Jews — in New York and across the U.S. — with harsh criticism of Israel, including saying its military campaign in Gaza amounts to genocide.

The tensions within the politically diverse community were illustrated Friday in a sermon by Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, who leads Central Synagogue in Manhattan, one of the country’s most prominent Reform synagogues.

She pointedly criticized Mamdani’s words about Israel, yet declined to endorse either of his opponents, Andrew Cuomo and Republican Curtis Sliwa, and pleaded for New York’s Jews to minimize virulent political infighting.

“It endangers all of us: It’s the way we are trying to impose a litmus test on other Jews, essentially saying you’re either with us or you’re against us,” she said.

A local election in the national spotlight

Buchdahl has faced some criticism for not signing a statement endorsed by more than 1,000 Jewish clergy members nationwide denouncing Mamdani. She said that on principle, she doesn’t endorse candidates or sign joint statements, but she interrupted her sabbatical schedule to return to her pulpit the weekend before the election.

In the sermon, Buchdahl said Mamdani has “contributed to a mainstreaming of some of the most abhorrent antisemitism” with words that she said were not only “demonizing Israelis, but echoing the age-old antisemitic trope that Jews across the world are the root cause of our problem here.”

Mamdani has made overtures to Jewish voters throughout the campaign, promising to increase funding to investigate antisemitic incidents in New York and repeatedly condemning violence in the Middle East. He has also denounced “atrocities” committed by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, describing the attacks as a “horrific war crime.”


But Mamdani has not retreated from his long-standing support for Palestinian rights. He also has said he would direct the city’s police department to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he visits New York on charges brought by the International Criminal Court.

In response to allegations that his views amount to antisemitism, Mamdani has often quoted an Israeli man whose brother was killed on Oct. 7, saying that “we must never give up on the conviction that all life, Israeli and Palestinian, Jewish and Arab, is equally precious.”

Buchdahl, in her sermon, said she recognizes the voices of younger Jews who say they shouldn’t fearfully vote based on a “single issue when other issues are just as urgent.” They cite Mamdani’s outreach to Jewish leaders and his moderated rhetoric.

“I would not quickly trust a campaigning politician changing his lifelong positions, but I hear those who believe that we must engage even with those we deeply disagree with or risk isolating ourselves,” Buchdahl said.

Leading rabbi: It’s not a simple choice

Like Buchdahl, the president of the Union for Reform Judaism, New York-based Rabbi Rick Jacobs, said he was sticking by his long-held decision to avoid making political endorsements.

“If you think the choice for mayor is simple, I respectfully suggest that you are not paying attention,” Jacobs wrote in an open letter last week. “I implore our Jewish community and all New Yorkers to carefully consider the many urgent issues our city faces before casting your vote.”

“I can attest that Zohran Mamdani is not lacking in empathy for the Jewish community’s anxiety over regular threats to our safety. In public interviews and in a personal meeting, I’ve heard him pledge to protect the Jewish community,” wrote Jacobs, before raising doubts about the Democratic candidate.

“Mamdani has been consistent in saying that he believes Israel has a right to exist as a state of all its citizens, but not as a Jewish state,” Jacobs wrote. “His argument might sound tidy in a seminar; in the real world it is cause for grave concern.”


Among the signatories of the anti-Mamdani statement was a prominent Conservative rabbi from New York, Elliot Cosgrove.

“To be clear, unequivocal and on the record, I believe Zohran Mamdani poses a danger to the security of the New York Jewish community,” Cosgrove declared at the start of a recent sermon at Park Avenue Synagogue.

“Zionism, Israel, Jewish self-determination — these are not political preferences or partisan talking points,” Cosgrove added. “They are constituent building blocks and inseparable strands of my Jewish identity.”

Even Hasidic leaders are divided

As evidence of the divisions within Jewish ranks, there have been competing endorsements of Mamdani and Cuomo by leaders of different factions within the Satmar Hasidic community.

On Sunday, Rabbi Moshe Indig, a leader of the community’s Ahronim branch, declared his support for Mamdani, posing in a handshake with the candidate at a meeting in Brooklyn. Within hours, three other leaders of the branch repudiated Indig’s action and endorsed Cuomo.

“Across the board, the progressive movement’s crusading agenda is a threat to our ability to live as Torah Jews and educate our children with the same values,” the pro-Cuomo leaders said.

To the left of the political center, New York-based author and commentator Peter Beinhart spoke in a recent video of his dismay at the vitriol being directed at Mamdani by many Jewish leaders.

Beinhart said he worries “that the organized American Jewish community was willing to sacrifice almost anything to preserve unconditional support for the state of Israel, that every other value, every other principle was subordinated to that.”

“What are you willing to sacrifice in order to prevent a New York mayor who says that Israeli Jews and Palestinians should live equally under the same law? What are you willing to try to do to destroy such a candidate? The answer is: lie with almost anyone, do almost anything.”

___

Smith reported from Pittsburgh. AP journalist Jake Offenhartz contributed from New York.

___


Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

DAVID CRARY
Crary has headed AP’s 11-person Religion team since 2020. Among previous AP jobs, he was a foreign correspondent for 14 years, and has used that experience to bolster AP’s worldwide religion coverage.
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Comment by AMISRAELCHAI555.


AM
AMISRAELCHAI555NOVEMBER 4, 2025


How quickly we forget the Palestinian people were offered a solution but their authorative party, the PLO [led by Yassar Arafat], rejected that agreement. This only demonstates that their only solution is the end of the only safe haven for the Jewish people, the State of Israel.
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At least 20% of Zohran Mamdani transition committee team linked to radical anti-Zionist groups: ADL | New York Post

At least 20% of Zohran Mamdani transition committee team linked to radical anti-Zionist groups: ADL | New York Post



At least 20% of Zohran Mamdani transition committee team linked to radical anti-Zionist groups: ADL
By
Hannah Fierick,
Matthew Fischetti and
David Propper
Published Dec. 22, 2025
851


At least 20% of Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s transition committee members have ties to radical anti-Zionist groups that “openly promote terror and harass Jewish people,” the Anti-Defamation League found in a stinging report Monday.

The ADL pinpointed several activists who have downplayed the horrors of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel or were involved in the anti-Israel encampments that sprung up on New York City college campuses last spring.
11ADL report reveals 20% of Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s transition committee members have ties to radical anti-Zionist groups.Andrew Schwartz / SplashNews.com
11Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan speaks about his ousting from Facebook at St. Sabina Catholic Church in Chicago.AFP via Getty Images
11Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, alongside his mayoral transition team, speaks during a news coference at Flushing Meadows.AFP via Getty Images


Roughly 80 of the 400 people named to staff Mamdani’s 17 transition committees “have a documented history of making or sharing anti-Zionist or anti-Israel statements,” the report found.

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A handful were also found to have ties to the Nation of Islam or its antisemitic leader Louis Farrakhan, including Jacques Léandre, a member of the transition’s Committee on Legal Affairs, the ADL said.

The revealing report came less than a week after Mamdani’s director of appointments, Catherine Almonte Da Costa, was forced to resign when decade-old antisemitic and anti-police remarks she made on social media resurfaced — including rants about “money hungry Jews” and defunding NYPD “piggies.”

The ADL said that and the new findings in its report raise questions about the vetting process for Mamdani’s appointments, and whether the “concerning statements, associations and activities” had been identified by his transition team.

“Many of Mayor-Elect Mamdani’s Transition Committee appointments are inconsistent with his campaign commitments to prioritize the safety of New York’s Jewish community,” the ADL wrote in the report.

“The composition of these Transition Committees will directly influence the administration’s policies and approach to Jewish community concerns, and the current appointments raise serious questions as to whether those concerns will not be adequately represented or addressed.”

Mamdani, who takes office Jan. 1, insisted Monday that he’s “always spoken out against antisemitism and hatred in any form.”
11Kazi Fouzia’s Facebook post featuring a video of a pro-Palestine protest.
11Youssef Mubarez (R) and Ilhan Omar (L).

The democratic socialist has faced ongoing criticism over his staunch criticism of Israel – but has worked to earn support from more of New York’s Jewish community since getting elected, including appearing in a recent Hanukkah video with actor Mandy Patinkin.

The ADL found about 80 transition members who have been involved with virulent anti-Zionist groups that “openly promote terror and harass Jewish people,” like Students for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace and Within Our Lifetimes — all of which have helped spur fiery anti-Israel protests across the Big Apple.

The anti-Israel rabble rousers named in the ADL report include:Zakiyah Shaakir-Ansari, on the youth and education committee, was pictured in front of a banner with an inverted red triangle – a symbol that has been used by Hamas – with the words “Long Live The Resistance” on it. The photo was taken during an anti-Israel encampment at City College in spring 2024.
Gianpaolo Baiocchi, on the committee on community organizing, was previously arrested at an NYU encampment that featured inflammatory rhetoric against Israel.
Youssef Mubaraz, on the small business and minority and/or women-owned business enterprise committee, dismissed as “propaganda” a Facebook video about Hamas terrorists raping and kidnapping of Oct. 7 victims.
Kazi Fouzia, on the committee on worker justice, claimed on the day after the terror attack that killed 1,200 Israelis that “resistance are [sic] Justified when people are occupied.”

The ADL report additionally referenced ties between Farrakhan and two other committee members, former Women’s March leader Tamika Mallory and Mysonne Linen, a convict-turned-activist who The Post previously reported was advising Mamdani on the criminal justice system.

Léandre, the attorney who’s a member of the Nation of Islam, attended the group’s 2022 Saviors’ Day conference, which featured Farrakhan slamming “the Jews and their power,” according to the ADL.
11Mamdani insisted he was ready to “protect” Jewish New Yorkers as mayor.Derek French/SOPA Images/Shutterstock
11Report highlights members who downplayed Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack or have ties to Louis Farrakhan and Nation of Islam.Getty Images

He also urged social media followers to wish Farrakhan a happy 86th birthday in a May 2019 Facebook post while commending him for being dedicated to “reforming, defending, and enriching the lives of countless men and women,” the ADL said.

“I personally thank him for inspiring me to aspire to dedicate my life toward towards the uplift of our community,” the post said. “This is not hate, but simple pure love and truth.”

Asked about the ADL report during an unrelated press conference Monday, Mamdani insisted he was ready to “protect” Jewish New Yorkers as mayor — while slamming the findings for not distinguishing between antisemitism and criticism of Israel.

“I have always spoken out against antisemitism and hatred in any form, and have made it clear that the commitment I have made to protect New Yorkers, to protect Jewish New Yorkers is one that I will uphold as the next mayor of the city,” he said.

“And we must distinguish between antisemitism and criticism of the Israeli government,” Mamdani continued, “the ADL report oftentimes ignores this distinction, and in doing so, it draws attention away from the very real crisis of antisemitism we see, not only just in our city, but in the country at large.

“And this is a team we are speaking of of more than 400 New Yorkers that we have assembled to advise on the transition.”
11Baiocchi was previously arrested at an NYU encampment that featured inflammatory rhetoric against Israel.
11Shaakir-Ansari, was pictured in front of a symbol that has been used by Hamas.
11Mubarez dismissed a “propaganda” Facebook video about Hamas terrorists raping and kidnapping of Oct. 7 victims.
11Fouzia, claimed on the day after the terror attack that killed 1,200 Israelis that “resistance are [sic] Justified when people are occupied.”

Rabbi Marc Schneier, who leads the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, said he wasn’t shocked by the ADL’s finding.

“Mamdani is drawing a false distinction between antisemitism and criticizing the Israeli government,” he told The Post. “He is in no position to draw such a distinction when he will not even recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, which is antisemitic in of itself.”

Mamdani responded the report while announcing Samuel Levine, an alum of former President Joe Biden’s administration, as his commissioner of Consumer and Worker Protection.
851

What do you think? Post a comment.

The incoming mayor has faced questions about other members on the assortment of transition teams, including advocates for cop killers and other anti-police activists.

The ADL urged Mamdani to say what vetting was done for transition team members and how the process might change when he settles on the rest of his appointments for his administration.

— Additional reporting by Carl Campanile

Filed under Zohran Mamdani
12/22/25
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Angela Buchdahl, prominent NYC rabbi, ratchets up criticism of Mamdani — and cautions against Jewish infighting - Jewish Telegraphic Agency

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