I speak from the seat, not the sideline.

The Leader Is the Keystone

An arch stands because of one stone at its center, the stone that locks the two sides into strength. It is cut to fit. It is shaped, not born.

Most people arrive in a senior seat with a title and a congratulations, and nobody has ever explained what the seat actually holds. So they work harder. And here’s the part almost nobody says out loud: a leader can be performing well and losing authority at the same time. The numbers are fine. The reviews are fine. And somewhere in the building, decisions that used to come to them have quietly stopped coming, or never came at all.

This talk walks the room through the EGER Framework: Expectations, Governance, Environment, and Results, the four forces that either hold a leader up or grind them down, in the system around them and inside them. It shows people where the load is landing in their own organization. They recognize themselves fast, which is why the Q&A tends to run long.

Living Bravely

I I have lived through two plagues. I was a young rabbi in the early years of HIV/AIDS, burying men my own age faster than I could learn their names, and I led a congregation through COVID thirty years later. Courage and resilience are not abstractions for me. They are lived.

7 Principles for Living Bravely came out of that, written with my friend Rev. Neil Thomas across two traditions, his Christian and mine Jewish, because neither of us could do it alone and neither of us thought our own tradition had all of it.

The seven principles are practical rather than inspirational. This is not a talk about staying positive. It’s about what people actually do on the days they’re frightened and still have to lead, and it’s honest about the cost. People who have been through something recognize it immediately. People who haven’t are getting it before they need it, which is the better time.

Moral Courage When the World Is Loud

\Noise, confusion, chaos. Your people are bombarded with information and don’t know who to trust. And in leadership especially, there are very few places left where anyone can be fully authentic.

Leadership without moral and ethical structure drifts: toward ego, toward self-interest, toward what is merely expedient. Not usually in one dramatic decision. Usually in fifty small ones nobody logged.

This talk is about what ethical grounding actually looks like when it’s a Tuesday and the choice in front of you is genuinely hard. Moral courage is rarely a grand stand. It’s the next small decision, made right. It draws on rooms I’ve been in: presidents, prime ministers, and members of Congress, and just as many hours in city council chambers, where I currently serve on Austin’s Public Safety Commission. The city chamber taught me more than the state dinner did.

The Only One in the Room

For most of my career I was the only woman at the table, or the only gay person, and frequently both. Not occasionally. Structurally, for years at a stretch.

You learn things in that position you cannot learn anywhere else. You learn what authority is actually made of, because none of it was handed to you with the chair. You learn to read a room faster than the people who are comfortable in it. You learn the difference between being included and being counted. And you learn the expensive one: how much of your energy goes into managing other people’s comfort, and what it costs you to keep spending it.

This is not a talk about diversity. It’s a talk about authority: how it gets granted, how it gets quietly withheld, and how a person builds it from nothing when none of it came with the title. Everyone who was the first anything recognizes themselves in it immediately. So do the people who hired them and never quite understood why it was harder than it looked.

Gender, Sexuality, and the People You Lead

Most leaders were trained before this vocabulary existed, and most have already had a conversation they weren’t ready for: an employee coming out, new pronouns in an email signature, a manager asking what the policy is before there is one.

This talk covers what the terms actually mean, where authority is still quietly withheld from women and LGBTQ leaders, and what to say when the answer matters to the person in front of you. It’s practical rather than theoretical. People leave able to do things on Monday they couldn’t do on Friday.

Pride, and What It Cost

I officiated the first legal same-sex wedding in California in 2008. I was the first openly LGBTQ president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis. And I buried a generation of young men in the early years of AIDS.

This talk is the history most Pride events skip: what it actually took, who paid for it, and what courage looks like now that the parade has sponsors.

Antisemitism After October 7

I have spoken to corporate Jewish employee resource groups about antisemitism since October 7, and about what the 2025 Israel-Iran war meant for Jewish colleagues at work.

This talk is for the Jewish employee who feels alone in the building, and for the leaders who want to support them and aren’t sure how.

For congregations and community groups, there’s also a single class, Zionism: what it is and isn’t →