Hadassah Magazine Executive Editor Lisa Hostein interviews Rabbi Delphine Horvilleur, author of the recent best seller How Isn’t It Going? Conversations After October 7 and the inspiration behind the hit streaming series Reformed, which is loosely based on her award-winning 2021 essay collection Living With Our Dead. One of only a handful of female French rabbis, Horvilleur has become a leading public intellectual in her native country and a powerful proponent for plurality and interfaith dialogue. 

In this episode of Hadassah Magazine Presents, Horvilleur recounts her unconventional path to the rabbinate (with stops in medical school and as a journalist along the way), and talks about why being a female rabbi and a reform rabbi is still so unusual in France. She delves into the HBO Max TV show inspired by her book and discusses what the show gets right and where it departs from her own experience. Tackling larger questions about “What is true leadership” and “What is the purpose of rabbinic leadership,” she turns to the antisemitism facing French Jews, how it anticipated what American Jews are facing today and what it looks like in France at this moment. 

She says: “I’m pretty convinced that I want to dedicate my rabbinate to the bridge-building business, but I have to admit that in a situation like ours it’s quite obvious and normal and understandable that people also want to strengthen protective walls around their Jewish identity. And the question for me as a Jewish leader is … how do you reconcile these two existential needs.”

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