love peace and chase after peace.

Before the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced that it would honor fashion designer John Galliano with a major Costume Institute exhibition next spring, the museum convened at least two unusual meetings: a face-to-face with Galliano and a number of prominent rabbis, and a larger meeting with Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, museum officials and several prominent Jewish leaders.

The unusual collision of fashion and Judaism, first reported in The New York Times, reflected the challenge facing the Met as it prepares to celebrate one of fashion’s most influential designers who was also the perpetrator of one of its most notorious scandals. Fifteen years after Galliano was fired as chief designer of Dior for praising Hitler and hurling antisemitic abuse at patrons in a Paris café, the fashion exhibition has become a test of what Judaism means by teshuvah — repentance — and whether genuine accountability can coexist with public redemption.

The Met’s announcement also comes at a time when many Jews see a spike in antisemitism, ostensibly ignited by Israel’s war in Gaza but fanned by anti-Israel rhetoric that is often indistinguishable from antisemitism.

Accordingly, the debate over Galliano’s return to fashion — he recently signed a multi-year deal with the fashion brand Zara — touches on questions that Jewish tradition has wrestled with for centuries: how to repent, and when to forgive.

Jewish thinkers, from the medieval sage Maimonides to the 21st century thinker Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, have emphasized that teshuvah is not a simple apology or a request for forgiveness. It is a demanding process of acknowledgment, repair and transformation. And crucially, they argue, forgiveness is not something the person who caused harm is entitled to receive on demand.

Galliano has been a touchstone in debates like these since 2011, when a video, which that surfaced online, showed the designer, in a lengthy rant, praising Hitler and telling onlookers that they would have been killed by Nazis. Earlier that same year, a Jewish woman and an Asian man accused him of directing slurs at them during an altercation at the same café. A French court later found Galliano guilty of making public insults based on race, religion or ethnicity in the cafe incident and levied a suspended fine.

Dior fired him. His reputation appeared destroyed.

But Galliano’s story did not end there.

After entering treatment for substance abuse, Galliano began a long process of rehabilitation. He released a statement of regret, met with Jewish leaders and spoke publicly about confronting his own ignorance and prejudice. In 2013, the Anti-Defamation League said it believed he had demonstrated “true contrition” and that people could change when they accepted responsibility and worked to understand the harm they had caused.

The late Abraham Foxman, then the national director of the ADL and perhaps the last Jewish leader who could unilaterally grant an accused antisemite absolution, met with Galliano. He arranged for the designer to study with a rabbi and visit Auschwitz, and felt Galliano’s amends were sufficient to even asked retailers to again stock his designs.

“Mr. Galliano has worked arduously in changing his worldview and dedicated a significant amount of time to researching, reading, and learning about the evils of anti-Semitism and bigotry,” Foxman, who died in May, said at the time.

Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the ADL, echoed Foxman’s approval in an email to The New York Times last week that he subsequently posted to X: “We believe John Galliano has genuinely worked through the issues that led to his antisemitic outburst years ago in Paris, and we have long since accepted his apology,” Greenblatt wrote. “His efforts to repair the damage his words caused and to learn from that incident should be applauded.”

Two of the rabbis who attended the May meeting (a third wasn’t named by participants or reporting on the meeting) also accepted the sincerity of Galliano’s contrition, even as they bluntly described to the exhibit organizers the climate in which the exhibit would be appearing.

In an interview with JTA, Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, said he also met separately with Galliano in the spring. He came away feeling assured that the designer was “an incredible positive model of a guy who did the work to really earn back his position.”

The 2011 “Inspiration Dior” exhibition at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow featured John Galliano’s extravagant 18th-century French court-inspired designs. (Shakko/Wikimedia Commons)

Jacobs said meeting with Galliano reinforced what he considered a persuasive endorsement by Foxman.

“I was compelled by John Galliano and how he addressed his story. He wasn’t sugarcoating it. He wasn’t mouthing something that he was prepped to share,” said Jacobs. “I felt he was really honest and contrite.”

At the same time, Jacobs made clear to the Met team that the exhibit would be a missed opportunity if it didn’t forthrightly acknowledge the harm Galliano had caused.

Like Jacobs, Rabbi Joshua Davidson of the Reform Congregation Emanu-El in New York also said at the May meeting that many Jews may reasonably find the tribute painful, given it comes amid a rise in antisemitic incidents and renewed anxiety about Jewish safety. Like Jacobs, he also suggested that they include not just Galliano’s accomplishments but his failings.

“You have the opportunity to use this as a chance to teach about the dangers of antisemitism, the way it metastasizes, and what can be done to fight it,” Davidson told JTA, characterizing his charge to the organizers. “This is a challenging moment to do this sort of exhibition. I think we all acknowledged that, therefore, it places a greater responsibility upon the shoulders of the museum to do what it can to use this in order to push back against antisemitism.”

The Met appeared to hear that message, and says it intends to make Galliano’s transgressions part of the exhibition rather than gloss over them.

“It will directly address the rupture caused by his antisemitic, racist, and anti-Asian conduct in 2010 and 2011, which resulted in his dismissal from Christian Dior and his eponymous label and his conviction by a Paris court for public insults based on race, religion, ethnicity, or origin,” Andrew Bolton, the Costume Institute’s curator in charge, said in announcing the exhibition. “It will also consider his subsequent treatment for substance addiction and his later public acknowledgment of his actions.”

Not everyone, however, is persuaded that Galliano’s rehabilitation — or the Met’s framing of it — satisfies the demands of teshuvah.

Hen Mazzig, the pro-Israel writer and activist, argued that the museum’s decision reflects a wider culture that has become inured to antisemitism and dismissive of the concerns of the Jewish community. Noting that the Met abandoned plans to honor Galliano in 2024, Mazzig wrote on Substack this weekend that objections from Jewish donors and allies were “a cost the Met was unwilling to pay” at the time. Two years later, he continued, the museum appears to have concluded that the “cost had fallen to roughly zero. That is a market read on how much anyone cares when Jews object.”

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, author of the 2022 book “On Repentance and Repair,” was unconvinced that Galliano has demonstrated the kind of transformation Jewish tradition demands.

She recalled finding Galliano’s original public apology — in which he said he accepted that the accusations had “greatly shocked and upset people” and that “anti-Semitism and racism have no part in our society” — lacking.

“It didn’t appear very sincere or heartfelt or engaged with what he really had done,” she told JTA.

In Jewish tradition, Ruttenberg said, repentance is a multistage process that includes an apology to the harmed party, a sincere and forthright confession and a demonstration in words and deeds that the transgressor has changed for the better.

“The work of teshuvah is the work of humility and the work of care and the work of relationship,” she said. “That’s not what I’m seeing here.”

She also worries that powerful public figures — from President Donald Trump to the comedian Louis C.K. — increasingly earn public absolution in ways unavailable to the average person.

“Our society is delighted to give free passes to people who will give them access to wealth and power,” she said.

Jacobs and Davidson, having spent time with Galliano and being respectful of Foxman’s judgment, said they found the designer to be sincere, and that his example provides a lesson for the Jewish community in how it handles repentance.

“I don’t think you have as many stories of people who were the absolute embodiment of antisemitic behavior and views, who really worked through and took accountability,” said Jacobs. “For the Jewish community, I think it’s an underscoring that there’s not only power to teshuvah, but actually it can really bring someone back from a really dramatic fall from grace.”

Davidson concurred. “I think all of us present [at the meeting] also recognize the value that Judaism places on teshuvah, and when you do the work, that’s pretty significant,” he said.

The fashion world, meanwhile, has already welcomed Galliano back to the literal and metaphorical front row. Wintour, perhaps the most influential figure in fashion, has been one of his strongest champions.

The annual Costume Institute exhibit opens with the Met Gala, a lavish red carpet extravaganza that is one of the highest-profile events in fashion and pop culture. In his statement, Bolton, the curator, said that the show will demonstrate how as a designer for Givenchy and Dior, Galliano “has remapped the world through fashion and how his conduct, its consequences, and changing cultural values have reshaped our understanding of his work.”

Ultimately, Davidson said, there are more important things for the Jewish community to be debating than the rehabilitation of a fashion star.

The unsolved murder of a Jewish man in a public park, a synagogue desecrated with motor oil and feces, a bagel shop splattered with dirt, and the sudden and tragic death of a Jewish journalist in a car crash.

Those incidents within a few miles of each other in a heavily Jewish neighborhood of Queens have put the Jewish community in that borough on alert since May. Ronnie Perry, who works at Benny’s Brick Oven Kosher Pizza in the neighborhood, said he can’t help but see a pattern.

“You know what the common denominator is, right?” Perry said.

Though investigators have not determined the motives in each case, prosecutors on Monday charged the same man who allegedly caused the death of the journalist in the car crash with a hate crime for allegedly vandalizing the bagel shop.

“I was beyond horrified,” said Rachel Sales, daughter of the killed journalist, Cara Trager. “The fact that this guy did a hate crime … days before means that he could have been apprehended before my mom was killed.”

Last week, prosecutors charged Dawood Faisal, 22, with a hate crime for destroying property at Bagels & Co, a bagel shop on the corner of a major thoroughfare in Fresh Meadows that advertises itself as kosher in neon lights and displays Israeli flags. On two separate occasions in May, Faisal allegedly knocked over multiple plant stands outside the shop and, in one instance, hurled dirt at the outside wall of the store.

In May, Faisal was arraigned on charges of manslaughter for the death of Trager, a Queens-based journalist who was also active in her Jewish community. Faisal allegedly sped over 75 mph through two red lights and collided with two cars, propelling one into a crosswalk where it struck Trager and her husband, Michael, who survived.

Prosecutors have not presented any evidence that Trager was specifically targeted by Faisal, and authorities are not investigating the crash as a hate crime, according to a spokesperson for District Attorney Melinda Katz.

But even before the vandalism charge, Michael Trager told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he believed that Faisal had been “looking to do damage in a heavily Jewish area.”

Perry, whose pizzeria is just a block from the vandalized bagel shop, told the Forward that the string of troubling incidents have rattled the community, and there’s not a lot visibly Jewish businesses like his can do to bolster security.

Nily Rozic, the Jewish state Assembly member who represents the Queens district where many of those attacks took place, said the incidents are more than just property damage or isolated violence.

“It really makes people feel like they’re being targeted as a community,” she said.

Sales told the Forward her mom was passionate about fighting antisemitism, and the two often discussed the uptick in anti-Jewish hate crimes — including the bagel shop’s vandalism days before Cara Trager’s death on May 29.

“This is a tragedy for the entire Jewish community to understand, and beyond the Jewish community, this is a tragedy for New Yorkers, for Americans, to see that hate crimes don’t end at vandalism. People could die,” Sales said. “My mom died.”

Just a week before the car crash, Albert Itzkowitz, a local rabbi and former kosher bakery owner, was shot and killed while visiting Kissena Park in Queens. Police are investigating the incident as a murder but have not identified any suspects.

His family is calling for the killing to be investigated as a hate crime.

“Daddy was visibly Jewish. He was targeted in broad daylight. He was killed in a public park where he should have been safe,” his daughter, Leah Livshitz, said at a press conference in June. “His family deserves answers. The Jewish community deserves answers.”

Then in July, two Orthodox congregations in Queens were desecrated with feces and motor oil. Police are also investigating that vandalism as a hate crime.

Rozic, the first and only Israeli-born New York state Assembly member, said even as investigations are ongoing, she understands the incidents as “interconnected” and has heard from Jewish constituents who feel afraid.

“Context is important,” Rozic said. “When incidents like this are followed by additional violence, it compounds the fear and the trauma of the community.”

Nearly three-quarters of all X posts within an analysed 12-hour period that featured the word “Jew” were antisemitic, according to findings from the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM).

CAM’s Antisemitism Research Centre (ARC) studied 963 public X posts containing the word “Jew” during a 12-hour window on August 2-3. Of those, 682, or 71.9 per cent, were hostile towards Jews, while 245 were neutral and only 26 positive.

The ARC also identified a number of posts that went beyond everyday antisemitism and featured calls for acts of violence or genocide.

One post called for a named individual’s death, whilst others called for a “Jew holocaust”, paired antisemitic slurs with threats or portrayed Jewish people as a “bioweapon” deployed against white people.

The hostility did not come from a single ideological source, the report notes, with some drawing on white nationalist themes or neo-Nazi signalling, and others using leftist anti-Israel rhetoric to generalise hostility towards Jews.

“Despite the different narratives, many of the same antisemitic tropes appeared throughout the sample, including claims of Jewish control over the media and politics, dual loyalty, and Freemasonry as a vehicle for Jewish power,” the ARC said.

Posts were classified by an AI model trained to detect antisemitic sentiment, which is defined as when Jews are presented negatively or spoken about in a negative way, including slurs, conspiracy tropes, dehumanising language or calls for harm.

CAM claimed the most extreme posts in the sample violated X’s own policies on violent speech and hateful conduct and called on the platform to enforce its own rules.

CAM said 71.9 per cent of posts being antisemitic points “to a systematic problem rather than isolated violations”.

X, the campaign group said, “should place this keyword under standing review and measure the hostility rate over time”.

"Sustained levels like this one should trigger proactive enforcement, not a reactive response to individual reports,” it added.

X has been approached for comment.

…sometimes there’s just nothing to say to such depravity.

(not attaching the photo for multiple reasons, especially since it includes a teenage girl)

same guy:

random post about kfc and a Black man:

do you know why it’s there? because #goyslop

In addition to the hateful slideshows themselves, the comments underneath are rife with hate. For example, one repeated comment we saw was "Well, well, well.” This is a racist and antisemitic dog-whistle posted repeatedly under TikToks with Jewish and Black/African American themes.

In online comment sections, people may use the phrase “every single time,” “well, well, well,” or a variation referencing the previous two such as “what do we say 3 times.” These phrases convey an antisemite’s or white supremacist’s belief that anyone they find problematic is always revealed to be Jewish, or in some cases, a different targeted minority group.

this is Isabel Peralta. video here

Isabel Peralta, Spain’s most photogenic fascist, has lost her appeal against the one-year sentence handed down last April for a 2021 speech outside the Moroccan Embassy in Madrid, in which she told a crowd it was facing “an invasion” and called for the “deportation” of migrants.

The Provincial Court had already ruled that her words went well beyond political comment, and Madrid’s appeal judges have now agreed. She remains, for now, free pending further appeal.

Spanish sentencing conventions mean that if upheld on appeal her 12 month sentence will probably be served outside jail with some form of house arrest or electronic tag. But this would depend on whether the court can satisfy itself that she will not reoffend, which in Peralta’s case seems at least questionable.

Blaming Jews

Peralta made her name at 18, addressing a fascist rally and speaking of “racial substitution” and a “Christian not Muslim Spain”.

That early speech was given in honour of the Blue Division, a volunteer force of fanatical Spanish Falangists who fought for the Third Reich on the Eastern Front.

Peralta took the opportunity to emphasise that historically “the Jew is to blame”, but her speech on that occasion was deemed not to have broken Spain’s laws against inciting racial hatred. This time she wasn’t so lucky.

International fan base

She has spent the years since building an international fan base among the likes of the UK-based nazi magazine, Heritage & Destiny, for whom she now writes as “European correspondent”, while helping launch Núcleo Nacional, the Hitler-portrait-in-the-office outfit fronted by Iván Rico Olivares.

Britain has had its own run-in with her. In September 2023 Searchlight revealed she had been allowed into the country, despite an existing German entry ban, to address H&D’s annual gathering at a Preston hotel, receiving a standing ovation from the assembled veterans of British neo-Nazism.

The row that followed put pressure on then Home Secretary Suella Braverman, with Jeremy Corbyn among those demanding answers.

Peralta hasn’t managed a repeat visit since: by last September she was subject to a banning order dating from the last months of the Conservative government, and had to settle for sending a message to H&D’s Preston conference rather than delivering it in person.

Her international supporters lost no time framing this week’s verdict as martyrdom.

True to form, she isn’t waiting for the appeal paperwork before getting back on the megaphone.

Another demonstration is planned outside the Moroccan Embassy this evening, the same venue as the speech that started all this.

strange how her rhetoric, explicitly called out as neo-Nazism, sounds exactly like this…

Hours after tens of thousands of people from Morocco stormed into Spain’s Ceuta enclave on Thursday, Spanish actor Javier Bardem shared a theory on who was behind this mass breach of his native country’s borders.

The theory reposted by Bardem—a vocal champion of the Palestinian cause who’s publicly accused Israel of committing genocide—blamed Israel, implying it somehow orchestrated the invasion 3,200 miles away from its territory to punish Spain’s government for its anti-Israel policies.

[…] One post shared by Bardem on Instagram, where he has 1.5 million followers, was a monologue by Indian comedian Sundeep Bhardwaj saying: “If you’re wondering what does the United States or Israel have to do with this: As usual, everything. Spain is the only country that has publicly declined to help the United States and Israel commit their genocide in Palestine. So, in the last year, Israel has been openly threatening Spain.”

Another reshared post by Bardem read: “We don’t know who engineered this crisis, but we know who benefits from a weakened, destabilized Spain: Israel, and the Western far right eager to turn migration into a weapon against Muslims.”

The conspiracies didn’t end with Bardem. Spanish Transportation Minister Oscar Puente retweeted a comment on the Ceuta invasion by Israel’s Ambassador to the U.N., Danny Danon, writing of Danon’s comments: “Well, things are starting to get pretty clear.” Danon had written that “maybe before it continues lecturing us, it’s time [Spain] explained to the world why it still maintains colonial enclaves in Africa.”

The U.S.-based Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM) found that 119 influencer accounts were responsible for 173 posts that peddled a “global antisemitic conspiracy,” as CAM called it, in connection with the Ceuta crisis. The posts generated 57.5 million views with an estimated reach of 103.1 million viewers, 1.9 million likes, and 368,400 shares in two days.

Every society “has its share of conspiracy theorists,” Rafael Medoff, an author and director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies in Washington, D.C., told JNS. “The danger is when insane theories start moving from the margins to the mainstream—and when those theories are aimed at inciting hatred against a minority group.”

Bardem’s “incendiary rhetoric is helping to fuel the flames of anti-Jewish hatred worldwide, at a time when such hatred is already exploding into violence in country after country,” Medoff added. He said it was “the height of irresponsibility for Javier Bardem to use his stature as one of Spain’s most prominent and admired actors to spread hatred of Israel.”

[…] Spain is one of several European Union member countries that have intervened in South Africa’s 2023 lawsuit accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza, widely understood as an endorsement of the disputed suit. Sánchez last year called Israel a “genocidal state.” Jerusalem has accused Madrid of fomenting the surge in antisemitic hatred.

On social media, some have connected the Ceuta conspiracy theories involving Israel to the painful Jewish history in Spain, where Jews had been persecuted for centuries after the Inquisition that began in 1492.

Angel Mas, the founder of the pro-Israel Action and Communication in the Middle East (ACOM), a Madrid-based non-profit, disputed a narrative in which the Ceuta crisis triggered Spanish antisemitism.

“Modern Spain is not an antisemitic society. Medieval history is not an accurate guide to contemporary Spain, just as it would not be for England, France, Germany or Switzerland,” Mas, a vocal critic of the Sánchez government, told JNS.

“modern Spain is not an antisemitic society” lol. lmao even!