love peace and chase after peace.

steve_leder

2024-2026 things changed dramatically across our society: elite cultural institutions, publishing houses, politics, social media, NYC, academia, and as I discuss here, The Met. Thank you for having me @cbsla

laurendlondon:

This news is very upsetting to me. Galliano did not just make antisemitic comments. He IS an antisemite. A crazy talented designer but a VILE human who does not deserve forgiveness. In 2019 I witnessed one of his rants. This time, at the Henri Chenot spa in Merano where there is no alcohol to blame…no drugs…not even sugar or caffeine. Galliano was sober and this was 8 years after his despicable rant that got him fired from Dior. My friend was on the phone with her daughter speaking English. Then she switched languages and started speaking Hebrew. The minute Galliano heard Hebrew he started screaming “Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas…”. Over and Over. On repeat until my friend hung up the phone. It was July. When my friend asked him if he had a problem with Hebrew he promptly and very unapologetically responded that he did. She then told him that she had a lot of his clothes and when she got back to her home in Israel she would dispose of them. He told her to please do…..

This man does not deserve honor, forgiveness or acceptance. He is a racist and a Hitler-loving antisemite both drunk and sober. And as we have seen, his hatred and bigotry is also not limited to Jews.

I know antisemitism is en Vogue in New York (and virtually everywhere now) but this is surprising nonetheless. Shame on you Anna Wintour!

[…] the decision to honor Galliano has left many furious. Philippe Virgitti, whom Galliano raged at in a Parisian bar, calling him a “f–king Asian bastard” and his girlfriend a “f–king ugly Jewish bitch,” and “dirty Jew face,” dubbed him “a pig” in a new book, adding, “He’s garbage, he caused a great deal of harm.” (x)

some comments from r/jewish:

Hen’s piece, if you missed it:

In 2024, honoring a man convicted of antisemitic abuse carried a cost the Met was unwilling to pay. In 2026, the board ran the numbers again and found the cost had fallen to roughly zero. That is a market read on how much anyone cares when Jews object, delivered by the people best positioned to know.

https://www.wsj.com/style/fashion/met-gala-2027-john-galliano-d757f618

Outcries over the 2026 Met Gala being sponsored by Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos didn’t stop it from raking in more than $42 million for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute—a record fundraising haul.

The 2027 gala will be headlined by John Galliano, the designer who has been re-embraced by the fashion industry in the years since he was convicted in 2011 for making antisemitic remarks in Paris, where public insults based on religion, race and ethnicity are a crime.

The Galliano gala and corresponding museum exhibition come at a time when institutions have been willing to revisit characters once considered irredeemable. In announcing his involvement, the Met didn’t name any sponsors of the event, which since 1995 has been chaired by Anna Wintour, the global editorial director at Vogue and a longtime Galliano supporter. Past years’ gala announcements have named sponsors; a representative for the Met said that sponsors for 2027 would be revealed at a later date.

Amy Odell, author of “Anna: The Biography,” characterized the choice of Galliano as perplexing from a fund-raising standpoint. “Are sponsors going to be OK with that?” she asked.

Since 2023, the Met Gala has raised over $120 million for the Costume Institute, with support from companies including Louis Vuitton, TikTok, Instagram and Condé Nast, which owns Vogue.

Requests for comment from Louis Vuitton, TikTok, Instagram and other past sponsors including Apple and Gucci weren’t immediately returned. A Condé Nast representative, in response to questions including whether the company intends to sponsor next year’s Met Gala, cited a statement that Wintour made last week.

“There is no one more deserving of an exhibition of this scale than John Galliano,” read the statement, which noted the designer’s professional highs and lows. “The show will take in the full arc of his career and grapple with all of it.”

In a separate emailed statement, Jonathan Newhouse, Condé Nast’s board chairman, referenced his longtime backing of Galliano. “I was proud to support him during a difficult period,” Newhouse said. “I hope he continues to create for years to come.”

The blockbuster fundraiser may become less essential, however. In May, the New York Times reported that the Costume Institute is potentially on track to becoming financially self-sufficient by 2030, and possibly 2028.

Galliano made his antisemitic remarks while serving as creative director at Dior, where he was promptly fired. He also lost his role at his namesake John Galliano brand. Galliano has said that he was drunk and struggling with substance abuse at the time. He has since gone to rehab, gotten sober and sought counsel from Jewish leaders.

As plans for the 2027 Met Gala came together, Galliano, Wintour and Costume Institute curator Andrew Bolton met with representatives from the Anti-Defamation League and Temple Emanu-El in Manhattan, among others.

Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism in North America, attended two meetings, including one with Galliano. He initially had concerns about how the public might react, he said. But his worries were soothed by what he characterized as a sincere desire among Galliano and gala organizers to use the event to demonstrate how people can atone for mistakes.

The Jewish leaders pushed for the gala’s corresponding exhibition to prominently acknowledge Galliano’s past behavior. Titled “John Galliano: Horizons,” the exhibit will span his work from 1984 to 2024 and begin with material addressing his antisemitic comments.

“Until I met John, until I had those conversations, I wasn’t 100% sure what I would find,” Jacobs said. But he did not believe he was being used as a shield for criticism. “If I didn’t feel that John had done the hard work of earning back his good name and making amends for his horrifying rant, I would have pushed back and not lent my support.”

Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO and national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said that his organization accepted Galliano’s apology long ago. “It’s on the Met and partners to meet the moment, not with token gestures around one exhibit,” he added.

Part of the issue, said Hen Mazzig, a Jewish writer and Israel advocate with more than 700,000 followers across Instagram and X, is that the public was not privy to the meetings. Even if the exhibit takes a nuanced approach, Mazzig added, that care may not translate to the gala itself—a party that derives its power from glamour and a star-studded red carpet where A-listers dress theatrically in outfits that pay homage to the affair’s theme.

“There is no footnote on a party,” said Mazzig.

Buzz about a possible Galliano exhibit at the Met had been percolating in the fashion world for years, said Dana Thomas, author of the 2015 biography “Gods and Kings: The Rise and Fall of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano.” Thomas said she didn’t believe the exhibit had widespread public support yet, “and that is what they are going to have to deal with for the next nine months.”

Galliano’s Dior designs have recently found a new audience, as younger generations have increasingly sought out Y2K-era vintage fashion. In March, the designer announced a two-year partnership with Zara, the fast-fashion giant owned by the Spanish company Inditex. A representative for Inditex did not respond to requests for comment.

Galliano had previously spent a decade as the creative director at Maison Margiela, starting in 2014. His final show for the brand in 2024 received widespread glowing reviews. Throughout Galliano’s comeback, Wintour has continued to appear by his side.

The year he started at Margiela, Galliano presented a British Fashion Award to Wintour, who accepted it wearing one of his designs for the brand. In January, the two sat next to each other in the front row at a Dior fashion show in Paris. In a 2023 documentary about Galliano, Wintour said she didn’t worry about how their friendship might affect her reputation. “I just wanted to help him,” Wintour says in the film.

Odell, the Wintour biographer, said the announcement of Galliano’s Met retrospective reminded her of something that André Leon Talley, Vogue’s longtime editor at large who died in 2022, told the author when she asked him what Wintour’s greatest strength was.

Bernie: let’s make the tent so big that it can accommodate all the clowns 🤡

Here's the beginning of the story:

Meg Keene, an established nonfiction author who has sold more than 150,000 copies of her two books offering tips for wedding planning, couldn’t find a publisher for her first novel — not because of the writing, she said, but because it was “too Jewish.” 

Keene said she was advised by one agent to cut anything Jewish from the manuscript unless it drove the plot, including changing a character’s name because Yael read as Israeli. The book, written soon after the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks in Israel, about a Jewish woman’s long-distance relationship with a boyfriend in Tel Aviv, was never published. 

Keene is one of a growing number of professionals who have announced in recent weeks the launch of their own Jewish publishing companies, aimed at fulfilling a need for frustrated authors who say they’ve hit the same wall: agents advising them to cut Jewish names and references to Israel, editors going silent on submissions that once would have been fast sales and a mounting sense that the industry’s embrace of the #ownvoices storytelling trend —  a hashtag used to amplify the work of diverse and minority voices — has an unspoken exception for Jewish writers.

Keene recently announced the launch of Meg Keene Books, her own imprint at Wicked Son Press, a Jewish publisher known mostly for right-leaning nonfiction. The company plans to release four to six fiction books a year, from romance to thrillers, selected by Keene and the Wicked Son founders, with the goal of elevating Jewish voices. 

"Earlier this year I got to the point where I realized I didn’t have anything left to lose,” Keene told *Jewish Insider*. “Jews were having all these conversations behind the scenes but it felt like whoever came forward was going to destroy their career. I felt like I was in a position — because of my past in digital publishing and connection to editors, I knew how to do it. So many authors couldn’t sell their first book. At least I had a track record, I could say I was a successful author and be taken seriously.” 

While discrimination against Jewish authors has been reported for years, industry professionals say it became more apparent and accepted after Oct. 7 and the ensuing Israel-Hamas war. 

In 2024, the Palestinian Festival of Literature published (https://jewishinsider.com/2024/11/petition-jewish-writers-palestinian-festival-of-literature-israel/) a petition signed by Irish author Sally Rooney and more than 1,000 others, which stated that, “We cannot in good conscience engage with Israeli institutions without interrogating their relationship to apartheid and displacement.” More recently, the free speech organization PEN America published a report (https://pen.org/a-silent-moratorium-interviews-with-israeli-and-jewish-writers/) detailing interviews with more than 30 Israeli and Jewish writers and literary professionals describing a widening cultural isolation.  

“PEN America’s recent blog post about the targeted harassment of Jewish and Israeli authors and literary institutions is an important acknowledgment of this problem,” Ari Ingel, executive director of Creative Community For Peace, told JI. “At the same time, many in our community believe that acknowledgement came only after a long period in which prominent incidents involving Jewish and Israeli writers did not receive the kind of timely and forceful public defense expected from a leading free-expression organization.”

There is no reliable industry-wide figure showing what percentage of Zionist or Jewish authors have been dropped, although Keene has collected data (https://www.jta.org/2026/07/16/ideas/i-gathered-the-data-on-jewish-fiction-publishing-the-trends-are-alarming) specifically on Jewish fiction publishing, which found that between 2023 and 2024, there was a 76% decline in fiction deal announcements to large presses that mentioned Jews, Judaism or Israel.  “Publishing decisions are generally confidential and are rarely explained to involved parties,” said Ingel. “But the evidence points to a recurring and increasingly documented pattern rather than a handful of isolated cases.” 

The Beautiful Six 💔💔💔💔💔💔

Tonight marks the second Hebrew yahrzeit of the murder of the “Beautiful Six”: Eden Yerushalmi, Carmel Gat, Ori Danino, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Alex Lubanov and Almog Sarusi.

They were brutally murdered by Hamas in a tunnel in Rafah.

As we light our Shabbat candles tonight, we do so with Eden, Carmel, Ori, Hersh, Alex and Almog in our hearts.

We will never, ever forget them.

Tonight begins the second yahrzeit (anniversary of the death according to the Hebrew calendar) of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Ori Danino, Carmel Gat, Alexander Lobanov, Almog Sarusi, and Eden Yerushalmi, z"l - six hostages who were brutally murdered by Hamas in August 2024, after 328 days in captivity. They were kidnapped on October 7, 2023 - five from the Nova music festival, one from Kibbutz Be'eri - and held in tunnels beneath Gaza until Hamas took their lives just days before IDF forces reached them.

We remember them, mourn them, and hold their families in our prayers. May their memories forever be a blessing. 🕯️

bring.hersh.home:

This Shabbat, starting at sundown tonight Friday through Saturday night, is the 25th of Av on the Hebrew calendar. It is the Yortzeit (date of death) of The Beautiful Six: Ori, Hersh, Eden, Almog, Carmel and Alex.

We will be lighting our regular Shabbat candles and a memorial candle for each of those holy souls.

May their memories be for a blessing. And a revolution...for goodness.

here’s more global data: