First Trump came for the women And I did not speak out Because I was not a woman. Then Trump came for the people with disabilities And I did not speak out Because I did not have a disability. Then Trump came for the African Americans And I did not speak out Because I was not African American.

Facebook.

First Trump came for the women
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a woman.

Then Trump came for the people with disabilities
And I did not speak out
Because I did not have a disability.

Then Trump came for the African Americans
And I did not speak out
Because I was not African American.

Then Trump came for the Mexicans
And I did not speak out
Because I was not Mexican.

Then Trump came for the Muslims
And I did not speak out
Because I was not Muslim.

Then Trump came for the gay, bi, and trans people
And I did not speak out
Because I was not gay, bi or trans.*

Then Trump came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew.**

Then Trump came for the journalists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a journalist.***

Then Trump came for the judges
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a judge.

And now Trump is coming for the Constitution of the United States
And if I do not speak out, what am I?

* Actually I am one of those, and I didn’t speak out about that.
** And one of those, and didn’t speak out about that either.
*** Ditto.




When I grew up in Soyth Africa, Martin Niemöller’s poem “First they came…” was a well-worn standard in any sort of Jewish education. It was plastered on posters issued by the Union of Jewish Students, printed in books and flyers, quoted at political meetings. I saw it so often that it became, for me, a secular version of the shema, the prayer anyone with the slightest amount of Jewish upbringing knows by heart: “Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one.”

The shema and “First they came” are both statements of something at the core of Jewish identity, and they form a kind of point and counterpoint stretched across thousands of years of history. The shemareminded the early Israelites that they were the people who, unlike their pagan neighbors, worshipped a single deity. Niemöller’s poem reminds modern Jews that, as a people who were almost wiped out, it’s our duty—as it is everyone’s duty—to speak up for other minorities under attack, lest we be next. The shema sets us apart from other peoples; “First they came” binds us together again.

To see Donald Trump methodically lay into one group after another during the months of the presidential campaign has been to see Niemöller’s warning writ large across our screens. But during all these months, I haven’t noticed much speaking out by one group in support of another.

A notable exception is the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the Jewish anti-racism body, whose head launched a blistering attack on Trump’s Islamophobia and racism in March and hasn't remained silent for even a day . Yet just a week earlier Trump got standing ovations at the annual conference of the powerful pro-Israel lobby group, AIPAC—a moment that I believe should stand as a mark of eternal shame for the leaders of America’s Jewish community.

There are probably more gestures of solidarity by one group towards another than we can easily see. One small example: non-Jews adding the “echo symbol”—triple parentheses, (((like this)))—around their names on Twitter, in a fight back against anti-Semites on the “alt-right,” who have used the symbol to single out Jews.

Yet such moments, while mildly heartwarming, almost never command the emotional power that makes them go viral; they tend to be buried in the social-media maelstrom by the latest Trump outrage. Moreover, I suspect that such solidarity is largely confined to the grassroots. How many African American leaders are there speaking out against Islamophobia, Muslim leaders speaking up for Mexican immigrants, and LGBT leaders coming out to defend people with disabilities? (If you’ve seen it happening, please let me know.)

It’s time for everyone to remember Niemöller’s words, and speak out in support of anyone who becomes the target of this hate-monger and his alt-right cohorts. At the end of the day, Trump is coming for all of us.Oy Vey Oy VeyOy Vey

To find Hillary Clinton likable, we must learn to view women as complex beings.Whether you realize it or not, you’ve spent your entire life being trained to empathize with white men. From Odysseus to Walter White, Hamlet to Bruce Wayne, James Bond to the vast majority of biopic protagonists, our art consistently makes the argument that imperfect, even outright villainous, men have an innate core of humanity.

To find Hillary Clinton likable, we must learn to view women as complex beings

Whether you realize it or not, you’ve spent your entire life being trained to empathize with white men. From Odysseus to Walter White, Hamlet to Bruce Wayne, James Bond to the vast majority of biopic protagonists, our art consistently makes the argument that imperfect, even outright villainous, men have an innate core of humanity. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Good art should teach us to empathize with complex people. The problem comes not from the existence of these stories about white men, but from the lack of stories about everyone else.

That’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot during this increasingly insane presidential election season. Particularly as I try to wrap my head around the fact that Hillary Clinton is on one hand the most qualified human being to ever run for president of the United States, and, on the other, one of the most disliked presidential candidates of all time. In fact, Donald Trump is the only candidate who is more disliked than Clinton. And he’s not only overtly racist, sexist, and Islamophobic, but also unfit and unprepared for office. How can these two fundamentally dissimilar politicians possibly be considered bedfellows when it comes to popular opinion?

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton celebrates among balloons after she accepted the nomination on the fourth and final night at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.

Gallons of digital ink have been spilled trying to figure out why Clinton struggles so much with likability. But perhaps the problem isn’t with her at all. Maybe it’s with us.

We tend to talk about likability as a black or white issue. But like the old adage, “I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like,” there’s no universal component of likability. After all, erudite Barack Obama, folksy Joe Biden, and angry Bernie Sanders couldn’t be more different, yet all three are beloved by their bases. Even Donald Trump—as divisive as he is—clearly has a magnetic pull among his loyal supporters.

But Clinton is different. Even many of those who plan to vote for her admit they don’t find her particularly likable. According to The Washington Post, just 33 percent of Clinton supporters are “very enthusiastic” about supporting her while 46 percent of Trump supporters say the same about their candidate. (For the record, Clinton—like most women—tends to be far more popular when she’s in office than when she’s running for one.) Pundits usually blame Clinton’s favorability issues on her perceived caginess, her tone, and her general awkwardness when it comes to public speaking. Essentially: Clinton’s flaws make her unlikable.

But that’s not the case for male politicians. In fact, it’s often their flaws that make them likable. After all, on paper the idea of an old disheveled man yelling sounds downright unpleasant. But in practice Bernie Sanders is an utterly charming and refreshing political figure. And while one might assume Joe Biden’s frequent gaffes and penchant for using words like “malarkey” would make him seem hopelessly old-fashioned, those are precisely the qualities that have transformed him into a beloved darling of the social media age. And Clinton’s own running mate, Tim Kaine, provides a particularly interesting contrast because he shares so much of her awkwardness. Yet far from being condemned for it, he was lovingly hailed as “America’s nerdy stepdad” after his speech at this year’s Democratic National Convention.

So why is Clinton critiqued for raising her voice like Sanders, speaking hard truths like Biden, and making an awkward Pokémon Go reference we almost certainly would have dubbed a “dad joke” had Kaine said it? Why do we find their flaws likable and Clinton’s flaws off-putting? Why isn't she seen as America's awkward aunt or nerdy stepmom?

I would argue it’s because we don’t yet have cultural touchstones for flawed but sympathetic women. We can recognize Sanders as a fiery activist, Biden as a truth teller, and Kaine as an earnest goof, but we just don’t have an archetype—fictional or otherwise—through which to understand Clinton. As the first female nominee of a major political party, her campaign is in uncharted waters. As Clinton explains in a recent post for Humans Of New York:

It’s hard work to present yourself in the best possible way. You have to communicate in a way that people say: ‘OK, I get her.’ And that can be more difficult for a woman. Because who are your models? If you want to run for the Senate, or run for the Presidency, most of your role models are going to be men. And what works for them won’t work for you. Women are seen through a different lens.

And our entertainment doesn’t help us understand Clinton either. Our movies, books, and TV shows are filled with attractive female love interests, badass female warriors, hissable female villains, and bumbling female leads. But we don’t have very many female protagonists who are allowed to be flawed in ways that are messily realistic not just charmingly endearing. We haven’t been taught to empathize with flawed women the way we have with flawed men.

Viola Davis is slowly balancing the antihero gender scales as Annalise Keating on How To Get Away With Murder. But like Clinton, she's frequently asked why her complex female character isn’t more likable. And as Davis points out to Variety, that’s just not something we question about male antiheroes like Tony Soprano and Hannibal Lecter. We find those characters inherently appealing despite the fact that they’re deeply flawed. Yet we struggle to do the same with imperfect female leads. We sympathize with the self-centeredness of Louis C.K. on Louie but we can’t stand it in Hannah Horvath on Girls.

And in a roundabout way that ties back to Clinton as well. Like any human being she is flawed and like any high-ranking politician, her flaws exist on a scale that requires an insane level of cognitive dissonance to comprehend (the same cognitive dissonance that allows us to “love” Obama even as we realize his drone warfare program is responsible for the deaths of potentially thousands of innocent people). And for the record, I have no problem with people critiquing Clinton’s flaws. Criticism is a crucial part of the political process and there’s plenty in Clinton’s record worth critiquing—from the racist dogwhistling language she used to support the 1994 Crime Bill to her hawkish foreign policy style. But what does bother me is when the criticism aimed at Clinton seems so much more severe than the kind aimed at her male counterparts.

And I’m not just talking about Trump, who by all accounts has completely coasted through this election season. Data shared by FiveThirtyEight suggests that although voters under 25 are “more likely than any other age group to approve of the job Obama is doing as president” and although Clinton is essentially running for a third Obama term, she’s winning under-25 voters by half as much as he did. That’s a fairly glaring disconnect. And as my friend Alasdair Wilkins explores for Paste Magazine, Joe Biden enjoys a far rosier public image than Clinton even though he shares many of her political flaws. Despite sponsoring pro-banking legislation, mishandling the Anita Hill trial, and authoring that 1994 Crime Bill, Biden is still looked at as loveable “uncle Joe.” Now to be fair, Biden isn’t currently in the pressure cooker of a presidential race. But even if he were, I suspect we would have a far easier time conceptualizing him as greater than the sum of his flaws, as we've long been conditioned to do with men. And that’s not a luxury Clinton enjoys.

Jonathan Chait made perhaps the most radical statement of this election season when he referred to Hillary Clinton as “a normal politician with normal political failings.” It feels groundbreaking to discuss Clinton in such benign terms because that’s simply not how she’s understood. She’s at best “the lesser of two evils” and at worst a scheming Lady Macbeth hungry for power.

Which brings me to my final point and perhaps the biggest elephant in the room: Sexism. Personally, I’m not hugely interested in how sexism plays into someone’s decision as to whether or not to vote for Clinton. But I am interested in how sexism has shaped Clinton personally. And particularly how it relates to the idea—as Indira A.R. Lakshmanan and Ezra Klein have both explored—that Clinton is warm and personable in intimate settings but more distant and awkward in large ones.

In another Humans Of New York post, Clinton attempts to explain that disconnect by telling a story from her past:

I was taking a law school admissions test in a big classroom at Harvard. My friend and I were some of the only women in the room. I was feeling nervous. I was a senior in college. I wasn’t sure how well I’d do. And while we’re waiting for the exam to start, a group of men began to yell things like: ‘You don’t need to be here.’ And ‘There’s plenty else you can do.’ It turned into a real ‘pile on.’ One of them even said: ‘If you take my spot, I’ll get drafted, and I’ll go to Vietnam, and I’ll die.’ And they weren’t kidding around. It was intense. It got very personal. But I couldn’t respond. I couldn’t afford to get distracted because I didn’t want to mess up the test. So I just kept looking down, hoping that the proctor would walk in the room. I know that I can be perceived as aloof or cold or unemotional. But I had to learn as a young woman to control my emotions. And that’s a hard path to walk. Because you need to protect yourself, you need to keep steady, but at the same time you don’t want to seem ‘walled off.’ And sometimes I think I come across more in the ‘walled off’ arena. And if I create that perception, then I take responsibility. I don’t view myself as cold or unemotional. And neither do my friends. And neither does my family. But if that sometimes is the perception I create, then I can’t blame people for thinking that.

Essentially what Clinton is saying is that the stiltedness of her public persona is a kind of self-preservation tactic born out of years of brutal misogyny. And while that doesn’t excuse the fact that she sometimes struggles with transparency, it transforms a dehumanizing flaw into a relatable one. It gives her a humanity that’s too frequently missing from the discourse around her.

Just as in order to understand Bernie Sanders you have to understand what it means to be an activist, in order to understand Hillary Clinton you have to understand what it feels like to face a lifetime of sexism. Unfortunately, while explorations of women grappling with inequality aren't completely absent from our entertainment, they’re also not incredibly common either—particularly in stories set outside the Mad Men era and particularly in media aimed at men. That’s why the Marcia Clark-focused episode of FX’s The People Vs. O.J. Simpson from earlier this year felt so revolutionary; it offered insight into the personal cost of sexism that many people—including many women—don’t often think about.

What’s especially telling is that the group most likely to enthusiastically support Hillary Clinton are older women in the workforce. As Jill Filipovic explores for The New York Times, that’s because unlike men or younger women (who deal with different feminist issues), working women are more likely to have been personally exposed to the kind of sexism and discrimination that has shaped Clinton. And once they understand Clinton’s experience, they like her better for it. They start to see her not as a Lady Macbeth, but as a Leslie Knope, a Hermione Granger, or a Paris Geller. And crucially it’s not just the idealized strengths of those fictional women that echo in Clinton, it's their relatable flaws too.

To find Hillary Clinton likable, we must learn to view women as complex beings.Whether you realize it or not, you’ve spent your entire life being trained to empathize with white men. From Odysseus to Walter White, Hamlet to Bruce Wayne, James Bond to the vast majority of biopic protagonists, our art consistently makes the argument that imperfect, even outright villainous, men have an innate core of humanity.

To find Hillary Clinton likable, we must learn to view women as complex beings

Whether you realize it or not, you’ve spent your entire life being trained to empathize with white men. From Odysseus to Walter White, Hamlet to Bruce Wayne, James Bond to the vast majority of biopic protagonists, our art consistently makes the argument that imperfect, even outright villainous, men have an innate core of humanity. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Good art should teach us to empathize with complex people. The problem comes not from the existence of these stories about white men, but from the lack of stories about everyone else.

That’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot during this increasingly insane presidential election season. Particularly as I try to wrap my head around the fact that Hillary Clinton is on one hand the most qualified human being to ever run for president of the United States, and, on the other, one of the most disliked presidential candidates of all time. In fact, Donald Trump is the only candidate who is more disliked than Clinton. And he’s not only overtly racist, sexist, and Islamophobic, but also unfit and unprepared for office. How can these two fundamentally dissimilar politicians possibly be considered bedfellows when it comes to popular opinion?

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton celebrates among balloons after she accepted the nomination on the fourth and final night at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.

Gallons of digital ink have been spilled trying to figure out why Clinton struggles so much with likability. But perhaps the problem isn’t with her at all. Maybe it’s with us.

We tend to talk about likability as a black or white issue. But like the old adage, “I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like,” there’s no universal component of likability. After all, erudite Barack Obama, folksy Joe Biden, and angry Bernie Sanders couldn’t be more different, yet all three are beloved by their bases. Even Donald Trump—as divisive as he is—clearly has a magnetic pull among his loyal supporters.

But Clinton is different. Even many of those who plan to vote for her admit they don’t find her particularly likable. According to The Washington Post, just 33 percent of Clinton supporters are “very enthusiastic” about supporting her while 46 percent of Trump supporters say the same about their candidate. (For the record, Clinton—like most women—tends to be far more popular when she’s in office than when she’s running for one.) Pundits usually blame Clinton’s favorability issues on her perceived caginess, her tone, and her general awkwardness when it comes to public speaking. Essentially: Clinton’s flaws make her unlikable.

But that’s not the case for male politicians. In fact, it’s often their flaws that make them likable. After all, on paper the idea of an old disheveled man yelling sounds downright unpleasant. But in practice Bernie Sanders is an utterly charming and refreshing political figure. And while one might assume Joe Biden’s frequent gaffes and penchant for using words like “malarkey” would make him seem hopelessly old-fashioned, those are precisely the qualities that have transformed him into a beloved darling of the social media age. And Clinton’s own running mate, Tim Kaine, provides a particularly interesting contrast because he shares so much of her awkwardness. Yet far from being condemned for it, he was lovingly hailed as “America’s nerdy stepdad” after his speech at this year’s Democratic National Convention.

So why is Clinton critiqued for raising her voice like Sanders, speaking hard truths like Biden, and making an awkward Pokémon Go reference we almost certainly would have dubbed a “dad joke” had Kaine said it? Why do we find their flaws likable and Clinton’s flaws off-putting? Why isn't she seen as America's awkward aunt or nerdy stepmom?

I would argue it’s because we don’t yet have cultural touchstones for flawed but sympathetic women. We can recognize Sanders as a fiery activist, Biden as a truth teller, and Kaine as an earnest goof, but we just don’t have an archetype—fictional or otherwise—through which to understand Clinton. As the first female nominee of a major political party, her campaign is in uncharted waters. As Clinton explains in a recent post for Humans Of New York:

It’s hard work to present yourself in the best possible way. You have to communicate in a way that people say: ‘OK, I get her.’ And that can be more difficult for a woman. Because who are your models? If you want to run for the Senate, or run for the Presidency, most of your role models are going to be men. And what works for them won’t work for you. Women are seen through a different lens.

And our entertainment doesn’t help us understand Clinton either. Our movies, books, and TV shows are filled with attractive female love interests, badass female warriors, hissable female villains, and bumbling female leads. But we don’t have very many female protagonists who are allowed to be flawed in ways that are messily realistic not just charmingly endearing. We haven’t been taught to empathize with flawed women the way we have with flawed men.

Viola Davis is slowly balancing the antihero gender scales as Annalise Keating on How To Get Away With Murder. But like Clinton, she's frequently asked why her complex female character isn’t more likable. And as Davis points out to Variety, that’s just not something we question about male antiheroes like Tony Soprano and Hannibal Lecter. We find those characters inherently appealing despite the fact that they’re deeply flawed. Yet we struggle to do the same with imperfect female leads. We sympathize with the self-centeredness of Louis C.K. on Louie but we can’t stand it in Hannah Horvath on Girls.

And in a roundabout way that ties back to Clinton as well. Like any human being she is flawed and like any high-ranking politician, her flaws exist on a scale that requires an insane level of cognitive dissonance to comprehend (the same cognitive dissonance that allows us to “love” Obama even as we realize his drone warfare program is responsible for the deaths of potentially thousands of innocent people). And for the record, I have no problem with people critiquing Clinton’s flaws. Criticism is a crucial part of the political process and there’s plenty in Clinton’s record worth critiquing—from the racist dogwhistling language she used to support the 1994 Crime Bill to her hawkish foreign policy style. But what does bother me is when the criticism aimed at Clinton seems so much more severe than the kind aimed at her male counterparts.

And I’m not just talking about Trump, who by all accounts has completely coasted through this election season. Data shared by FiveThirtyEight suggests that although voters under 25 are “more likely than any other age group to approve of the job Obama is doing as president” and although Clinton is essentially running for a third Obama term, she’s winning under-25 voters by half as much as he did. That’s a fairly glaring disconnect. And as my friend Alasdair Wilkins explores for Paste Magazine, Joe Biden enjoys a far rosier public image than Clinton even though he shares many of her political flaws. Despite sponsoring pro-banking legislation, mishandling the Anita Hill trial, and authoring that 1994 Crime Bill, Biden is still looked at as loveable “uncle Joe.” Now to be fair, Biden isn’t currently in the pressure cooker of a presidential race. But even if he were, I suspect we would have a far easier time conceptualizing him as greater than the sum of his flaws, as we've long been conditioned to do with men. And that’s not a luxury Clinton enjoys.

Jonathan Chait made perhaps the most radical statement of this election season when he referred to Hillary Clinton as “a normal politician with normal political failings.” It feels groundbreaking to discuss Clinton in such benign terms because that’s simply not how she’s understood. She’s at best “the lesser of two evils” and at worst a scheming Lady Macbeth hungry for power.

Which brings me to my final point and perhaps the biggest elephant in the room: Sexism. Personally, I’m not hugely interested in how sexism plays into someone’s decision as to whether or not to vote for Clinton. But I am interested in how sexism has shaped Clinton personally. And particularly how it relates to the idea—as Indira A.R. Lakshmanan and Ezra Klein have both explored—that Clinton is warm and personable in intimate settings but more distant and awkward in large ones.

In another Humans Of New York post, Clinton attempts to explain that disconnect by telling a story from her past:

I was taking a law school admissions test in a big classroom at Harvard. My friend and I were some of the only women in the room. I was feeling nervous. I was a senior in college. I wasn’t sure how well I’d do. And while we’re waiting for the exam to start, a group of men began to yell things like: ‘You don’t need to be here.’ And ‘There’s plenty else you can do.’ It turned into a real ‘pile on.’ One of them even said: ‘If you take my spot, I’ll get drafted, and I’ll go to Vietnam, and I’ll die.’ And they weren’t kidding around. It was intense. It got very personal. But I couldn’t respond. I couldn’t afford to get distracted because I didn’t want to mess up the test. So I just kept looking down, hoping that the proctor would walk in the room. I know that I can be perceived as aloof or cold or unemotional. But I had to learn as a young woman to control my emotions. And that’s a hard path to walk. Because you need to protect yourself, you need to keep steady, but at the same time you don’t want to seem ‘walled off.’ And sometimes I think I come across more in the ‘walled off’ arena. And if I create that perception, then I take responsibility. I don’t view myself as cold or unemotional. And neither do my friends. And neither does my family. But if that sometimes is the perception I create, then I can’t blame people for thinking that.

Essentially what Clinton is saying is that the stiltedness of her public persona is a kind of self-preservation tactic born out of years of brutal misogyny. And while that doesn’t excuse the fact that she sometimes struggles with transparency, it transforms a dehumanizing flaw into a relatable one. It gives her a humanity that’s too frequently missing from the discourse around her.

Just as in order to understand Bernie Sanders you have to understand what it means to be an activist, in order to understand Hillary Clinton you have to understand what it feels like to face a lifetime of sexism. Unfortunately, while explorations of women grappling with inequality aren't completely absent from our entertainment, they’re also not incredibly common either—particularly in stories set outside the Mad Men era and particularly in media aimed at men. That’s why the Marcia Clark-focused episode of FX’s The People Vs. O.J. Simpson from earlier this year felt so revolutionary; it offered insight into the personal cost of sexism that many people—including many women—don’t often think about.

What’s especially telling is that the group most likely to enthusiastically support Hillary Clinton are older women in the workforce. As Jill Filipovic explores for The New York Times, that’s because unlike men or younger women (who deal with different feminist issues), working women are more likely to have been personally exposed to the kind of sexism and discrimination that has shaped Clinton. And once they understand Clinton’s experience, they like her better for it. They start to see her not as a Lady Macbeth, but as a Leslie Knope, a Hermione Granger, or a Paris Geller. And crucially it’s not just the idealized strengths of those fictional women that echo in Clinton, it's their relatable flaws too.

God Save America from Donny T: What We Can Learn About a Hillary Clinton Presidency From the Experience of Women Rabbis

God Save America from Donny T: What We Can Learn About a Hillary Clinton Presidency From the Experience of Women Rabbis By Danya Ruttenberg (Guest)

For one, not to underestimate the impact of her just getting there

For one, not to underestimate the impact of her just getting there

This fall, Hillary Clinton may very well be chosen to be our nation’s biggest boss. If it happens, the historic nature of this event is likely to impact people of all genders in a lot of different ways, both consciously and not. How will America deal with a female commander-in-chief? What might be in store for Clinton, and for us, if she wins the election? Perhaps another sector still grappling with patriarchal notions of leadership can illuminate some of these questions. So: What can we learn about having a female president from women who’ve broken the stained-glass ceiling?

A number of friends—female rabbis, male rabbis, and congregant-types of many genders—to hear about their experiences of female rabbinic leadership. I didn’t tell most of them that I was working on a piece about the possibility of a woman POTUS. It didn’t surprise me that a lot of the things people mentioned are things I’ve had to deal with myself, but as the answers came in, it was hard to miss the parallels to the criticism that Clinton’s faced over the years, too.

Excessive attention to gender presentation, including a refusal to take a leader seriously if she’s read as too “feminine” and criticism of her whole personhood if she’s read as too “masculine”? Check. Inappropriate discussion of weight and body shape? Check. Gender tokenism (“We tried having a woman rabbi once, that didn’t work out.” “We couldn’t possibly have two women on the ticket!”)? Check. Dismissal of an issue as simply a “women’s issue” if a woman leader is raising it? Check.

Issues of authority, power, and respect are complicated for women in leadership. To take a pretty minor example from my personal experience: My first job after ordination was at Tufts University, at the Hillel where Rabbi Jeffrey Summit has been executive director for decades. He’s smart, energetic, enthusiastic, gray-haired and bearded, and known to every single Jewish (and non-Jewish) student on campus as Rabbi Summit. The most frequent question I encountered during my first year on campus by those same students? “Can I call you Rabbi Danya?” Often they wouldn’t even ask. Sometimes they just called me Danya.

True confession: I debated whether or not I should even share this story, even though it’s a microaggression that many, many of my female colleagues also deal with all the time. Of course, most rabbis I know, including myself, are happily referred to as different things in different contexts; the issue here was the leap in assumptions that the students made about how it was appropriate to refer to the female rabbi, even with a strong honorific precedent for the male rabbi. And yet, I wasn’t sure if it was blatant enough to convince the skeptics and scoffers. (But let’s face it: Much of the crap women leaders face comes in the form of microaggressions—almost too subtle to name, but effective nonetheless). Because we’re all supposed to be complicit in the story that gender doesn’t matter, not one bit—and when we breach that unspoken agreement, our stories have to be indisputably clear, beyond reproach.

But gender matters. And it’s the gap between the reality on the ground and the story that so often gets told about how sexism doesn’t exist (or isn’t relevant in this situation, whatever “this situation” is) that makes talking about this so complicated.

Those of us who are women leaders manage somehow to not be taken as seriously as our male counterparts and at the same time are somehow expected to go above and beyond on every front, whether in displaying our business acumen or in the time we devote to hand-holding. When my friend Rabbi Andrea London was interviewing for the senior rabbi position at the synagogue where she had been serving as the associate rabbi, a few people complained to the search committee that she hadn’t cared for them to the degree that they would have liked their time of need. London asked one of her female congregants about this, and was told, “I wouldn’t have expected more attention from Rabbi Knobel, but with you being a woman and all.”

It was striking that when I asked about women’s rabbinic authority on Facebook, most people—rabbis and congregants alike—responded to me privately, via email, phone, or direct message, rather than commenting on the original, friends-locked, post. For a lot of us, in different ways, talking about the complexities, ambivalences and, yes, outright sexism encountered by women leaders still feels fraught. Most of what people wanted to tell me didn’t involve telling a story in public about someone who’s currently their congregant—even general comments or stories about some unnamed rabbi they knew about were DM’d, with exhortations to please check in before quoting the respondent by name.

It feels like a lot of us are somehow expected to behave in public as though we live in a postpatriarchal world, in which gender equality is already a fait accompli—despite the obvious fact that, while the road is increasingly drivable, it’s still under construction and full of open potholes. Because talking about these issues even in a general way can open us up to being perceived as complainers or whiners, or worse—as the mentions of any even moderately well-known feminist on Twitter can attest.

Rabbi London mused, “Men are given authority immediately and women have to prove their competence and intelligence.” She feels taken seriously in her role now, as a senior rabbi, but it took time; one of the ways she got there, she said, was “by making men my allies. … When I have support from men, then I have more legitimacy.” For example, when she was interviewing to become senior rabbi at her synagogue, “having a strong cohort of men support my candidacy was crucial to my getting the job.”

Indeed, I finally got students to use the same language to refer to me that they used for my male colleague by asking him to go out of his way to refer to me as Rabbi Ruttenberg whenever he spoke about me in their presence. (Eventually they started calling me RDR—the acronym for Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg—which I found to be a wholly endearing mix of respectful and affectionate.)

“A rabbi has to be accepted by powerful men in the community to be successful,” London reflected. “If a rabbi is popular amongst women, but not men, that’s a death knell.”

***

Hillary Clinton knows all this, even if many of her critics—and some of her supporters—don’t. And fortunately, 30 years in politics and an emphasis on building relationships has made it possible for her to draw on critical endorsements from men who can help her cause—President Barack Obama and Sen. Bernie Sanders among them. I have no doubt that Clinton will continue to make use of relationship-building as a coalition-building and acceptance-garnering technique—and I have no doubt that, despite this, her leadership style will continue to be misunderstood. Perhaps—until one day, maybe it isn’t.

This too is a chronic problem. “I lead a highly selective fellowship programs for rabbis called Rabbis Without Borders,” said Rabbi Rebecca Sirbu. “Each year a couple of male rabbis come to me and say variations on, ‘Rebecca, the program is great. I am learning so much. Why don’t you speak/teach/lead more? I want to hear your voice.’ In every case, I know that they mean this as a compliment. They want to see me as a leader in the front of the room. I am always curious that they do not see what I do as leadership. At the same time, I hear from the female participants, ‘Rebecca, the program is great. I am so impressed with your leadership skills. You do a great job facilitating the group/managing the speakers/choosing reading/making this a holistic experience’.”

Clinton’s leadership style, too, in some ways could be understood as more “female”: She’s known for listening rather than talking, and for transforming the deep work of her “listening tours” into legislative action. She’s sometimes described as “empathetic,” and is said to “work hard at personal connections.” (Of course, men might be described as being great networkers.) Like Sirbu, many of her criticsmisunderstand her style as a weakness—if she’s not being charismatic at the front of the room, what on earth could she be doing?

And yet it’s exactly this gap that gives me hope. If it’s true that Clinton’s popularity is higher when she’s holding office, perhaps her ability to offer others the mic will be given more and more positive media coverage, and pave the way for less frontal modes of leadership to be finally understood—even by the most resistant men—as legitimate. If it happens, it probably won’t be a transformation of which anyone is consciously aware. I imagine positive coverage of Clinton, coupled with her emphasis on listening, relationship-building, and a half-female cabinet could simply, slowly but surely, penetrate people’s consciousness, until a different way of doing things just seems normal.

Which isn’t to say that the fact of Clinton’s gender, and what it represents, won’t also manifest in concrete ways. All of us who rabbi while female have moments in which our gender becomes a symbolic access point in good, privileged ways. The examples are myriad, and many of them are amazing and heartbreaking and powerful. My favorite recent one is, in the grand scheme of things, kind of small and sweet—though it also speaks to a deep trust that might not be so small after all. Rabbi Robyn Fryer Bodzin recently got the following text: “S will not be able to make it for her Bat Mitzvah meeting today. She got her period for her first time.” I don’t know what the presidential equivalent of a first-period text might be, but there’s no doubt in my mind that there would be important, boundary-transcending moments if Clinton makes it to the White House. Perhaps they would evoke, in their own way, the iconic photograph of the black child feeling President Obama’s hair, just like his own, and all that it represents to so many little boys like him.

Jaclyn Friedman, feminist activist and host of the podcast Unscrewed, wrote eloquently about growing up as a congregant of Sally Priesand, the first woman ordained by a rabbinical seminary—Hebrew Union College—in 1972. As she watched Priesand in action throughout her childhood, she says, she absorbed some key messages about her own potential. Priesand on the bimah taught her that “women are authoritative. Women are holy. Women do things men tell us we can’t do.”

If seeing a woman in a leadership role at shul can do this, how much more when there’s a woman holding the highest office in the land? Obviously, it matters if that woman is a good, strong, competent leader, but the impact of seeing her there at all shouldn’t be underestimated.