Rabbi Delphine Horvilleur, an alt-cool female intellectual, appeared this month on the cover of Elle France. The rabbi, 45, talked to the magazine about living and working in a country where anti-Semitism is on the rise, and the Jewish community can be inhospitable to female leaders.

She has written four books, but it’s her most recent one that has made her a staple in the French literary scene. Reflections on the Question of Anti-Semitism takes its title from an essay by Jean-Paul Sartre. In it, she explores the intersection of racism and anti-Semitism, and grapples with an uptick in French anti-Semitic incidents in the past few years.

Rabbi Horvilleur is at the forefront of liberal Judaism in France, the spiritual leader at the Liberal Judaism Movement of France, an egalitarian Paris synagogue. She worked briefly as a model in order to finance her studies, but she dislikes the outsize attention this episode in her life now receives. She argues that such focus on a woman’s appearance limits her authority.