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Jewish comedian Modi Rosenfeld, a mainstay for Orthodox audiences, is gay. So what?
(JTA) — Mordechi Rosenfeld, the Jewish comedian, insists that the recent Variety article in which he reveals he is married to a man is not a “coming out” piece.
“This article is showing that I’m a veteran comedian and I’m married to a man,” said Rosenfeld, who is known to his friends and fans by the nickname Modi. “This is it. It doesn’t feel like a coming-out piece to me because I’ve been out.”
Anyone who has listened closely to Rosenfeld’s podcast in the last year would know that he and his husband have been married since 2020. The pair talk about living and traveling together, and in a recent episode revealed they would be vacationing on Fire Island, which has a famous gay scene, with prominent gay Jewish cookbook author Jake Cohen.
But the news could easily have come as more of a surprise for one swath of Rosenfeld’s core audience: Orthodox Jews from communities like the one where he grew up, where LGBTQ inclusion remains an unfamiliar and often frowned-upon frontier. Rosenfeld has delivered his signature blend of highly informed Jewish comedy, which often digs into the technical details of Jewish law, on kosher Passover cruises; at benefits for Orthodox organizations including yeshivas, Young Israel chapters and Hatzalah, the Orthodox ambulance service; and on the annual Chabad-Lubavitch movement telethon. But until recently, his routine has contained little whiff of his personal life — in fact, some of his jokes suggested to his fans that he had a wife named Stacy.
“Stacy” is in fact his manager and husband, Leo Veiga, a millennial raised Catholic in South Florida whom the 52-year-old Israel-born, Long Island-raised comedian met on the New York City subway in 2015. The split content has reflected Rosenfeld’s long-espoused belief that the only way comedy can work is to tailor the set to the crowd.
“Even though some religious organization has brought me in and people are coming to see me, I understand I’m under the umbrella of a certain demographic that I need to respect and know the audience,” Rosenfeld told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “If you put me in front of an audience, I give them what they need. And they don’t need gay material — they need the material for this audience.”
“But when I’m on the road doing my material, I can do whatever I want,” he added. “They came to see me.”
The Variety article was born of Rosenfeld’s deepening belief that it’s possible to merge his Orthodox and gay identities more publicly — something that he has long done as a congregant and sometimes-cantor at the Modern Orthodox synagogue he attends in the East Village.
“The prayers are done in an Orthodox way. And somehow, gays have been attracted to come to this synagogue,” he said. “We have a whole group of gay people and we have a whole group of trans people welcome.”
“The rabbi’s thing is no one should ever feel bullied, no one should ever feel excluded,” Rosenfeld said. “Be you. Be a proud Jew and be you.”
Rosenfeld’s “not a coming out piece” is significant and part of a broader recent pattern, according to Rabbi Steve Greenberg, the founding director of Eshel, an advocacy organization for LGBTQ Orthodox Jews and their families.
“You used to leave. Coming out meant [you] had to go. Because you could either stay and be silent, or speak up and leave,” Greenberg said. “What has begun to change the story is people insisting on not choosing between their religious identities and their queer identities and insisting on staying in Orthodox communities.”
The Variety piece comes at a time of tension around LGBTQ inclusion in Modern Orthodoxy. Yeshiva University — where Rosenfeld studied at the Belz Cantorial School of Music — has made headlines for fighting for the right not to recognize an LGBTQ student club. This month, a synagogue affiliated with the Modern Orthodox flagship also made news for its treatment of a transgender congregant; Yeshiva’s top Jewish law authority said she could no longer pray there.
The episode ignited strong feelings for Rosenfeld.
“To torture someone like that, somebody who’s religious, who’s keeping the mitzvahs, who’s teaching, who’s doing that, and to open that up and to do what they did is so terrible,” Rosenfeld said. “It’s so, so terrible. That’s the only thing I can tell you.”
For Rosenfeld, there’s no tension between Jewish observance and being gay — although his articulation of why reveals an awareness of the pain that others might feel in trying.
“Being gay, you can keep Shabbos, you can keep kosher, you can keep anything you want to do,” he said. “You can learn Talmud, you can learn Torah, the only thing you can’t do is kill yourself. You can’t commit suicide. That’s not even on the table as an option.”
When Rosenfeld shared the Variety article on his Instagram page, the vast majority of the nearly 800 comments left by fans and friends showed support for his public embrace of his gay identity.
“It’s amazing that you announce that you are gay,” one fan wrote. “You are an example to all the Jews struggling with their gayness. You are a role model to me. Cheers.”
“I think it’s great you can be out with so many of your orthodox fans,” wrote Peter Fox, a freelance writer and Jewish community advocate. “What a wonderful gift of visibility.”
But a few commenters said they would boycott his work in the future, some citing interpretations of Jewish law.
“I can’t believe you are gay,” wrote one person. “What a giant Hillul HaShem [desecration of the name of God]. I lost all respect for you. Unfollowing now. And good luck to you when it’s time to be judged by The Almighty.”
Rosenfeld doesn’t anticipate that the Variety article will lose him any gigs. If anything, he says, it might actually increase his audience. Since he has started adding gay material to his repertoire, his audiences have been increasingly LGBTQ, like at some of the “Holidazed” shows he performed in December at Sony Hall in New York.
Still, he noted, “onstage, I’m more Jewish than I am gay.”
Rosenfeld began to dabble in comedy while working on Wall Street early in his career, when his colleagues realized he was good at impressions. In the last several years, he has emerged as a leader in a wave of comedians focusing on their Jewish identities, even playing himself on an episode of HBO’s “Crashing.” Five years ago, New York City’s then-mayor, Bill de Blasio, declared June 26 as “Mordechi Modi Rosenfeld Day” in honor of his contributions to the artistic community, and last August, Rosenfeld co-hosted the first-ever Chosen Comedy Festival on Coney Island with his frequent comedy partner Elon Gold to a crowd of 4,000. The Jewish comedy show has since gone on to an audience in Miami and will head to Los Angeles in February.
Meanwhile, Rosenfeld has embarked on a steady stream of sold-out shows on multiple continents himself, while enjoying several viral moments. In one bit that was shared thousands of times last year, he pilloried the practice of taking people who have made antisemitic comments to Holocaust museums, joking, “It just gives them ideas.”
Since comedy clubs reopened after their pandemic closures, Rosenfeld has worked on new material at New York’s iconic Comedy Cellar, where patrons’ phones are kept in sealed envelopes and filming is prohibited. The absence of phones gives comedians the freedom to workshop new material — and a lot of that new material, for Rosenfeld, has been focused on living with a millennial husband.
Rosenfeld and Veiga’s story is a classic New York City meet-cute: The comedian was riding the 6 train when he felt a tap on his shoulder. It was Veiga, then an intern at CAA, the talent agency, introducing himself.
“And then we went on a date,” Rosenfeld told JTA. “I picked him up and I brought him to the Comedy Cellar, where I was performing. And he didn’t know that.”
After his 15-minute set, Rosenfeld returned to the comedians’ table, where he had nabbed Veiga a seat, to gauge his date’s reaction. “I said, ‘So I’m a comedian.’ And then we had dinner, we had two more dates, and then he moved in.”
In the eight years they have been together, Rosenfeld credits Veiga with facilitating the evolution of his career as both his husband and manager. During the COVID lockdown, as comedians everywhere found themselves unable to perform in their usual crowded clubs, Rosenfeld says he thought he was getting a break from work — but it was Veiga who suggested a pivot to video. That’s when Rosenfeld grew his online presence and developed his now-beloved characters, like the Israeli know-it-all “Nir, not far” (married to the fictitious, off-camera Stacy) and the Hasidic Yoely, who reviews quarantine-era TV shows and runs for president.
While Yoely is a character, Rosenfeld, too, is religiously observant. He wraps tefillin in the morning, even while touring, and he and Veiga keep a kosher home. Though Veiga is not Jewish — the couple had a civil wedding — he attends synagogue with Rosenfeld, his Hebrew and Yiddish pronunciation is excellent, and he is extremely well-versed in Jewish ideas and lingo. That has occasionally enabled him to stand up for their relationship when encountering people who believe it is forbidden: In one anecdote on the podcast, Rosenfeld shared that at a Shabbat retreat at a yacht club in notoriously conservative Orange County, California, a man at the couple’s table told them that the Bible says two men should not live together. Veiga retorted that the Bible says people should not mix wool and linen — implying that not all strictures are always followed, and leaving the man dumbfounded, according to Rosenfeld’s account.
Veiga has been part of Rosenfeld’s podcast behind the scenes since it began in August 2021, and began appearing on-screen in the taped recordings in December of that year. (In a sign of how deeply Jewish content is woven into his own life, he once wore a kitschy shirt referring to “muktzeh,” the prohibition of touching or moving certain objects on Shabbat.) Rosenfeld co-hosts the podcast with Jewish comedian Periel Aschenbrand, where guests include a mix of mostly comedians with the occasional rabbi (one time, Alan Dershowitz made an appearance).
Leo Veiga, left, wears a t-shirt bearing the Hebrew word “muktzeh,” which refers to a prohibition of touching certain objects on Shabbat. (Screenshot via YouTube)
In the December episode with Jake Cohen, Rosenfeld and Veiga recounted their experience at the Republican Jewish Coalition meeting in Las Vegas. The couple, who admitted to following RuPaul’s Drag Race more closely than American politics, learned what causes Republican Jews were almost universally excited by (Israel and antisemitism on college campuses) and what causes they were lukewarm on (abortion) solely based on the volume of applause in the room. They also said they were surprised by how welcomed they felt as a gay couple at a Republican event, and remarked on how many of the political figures and donors they met were excited to show them pictures of all the other gay couples they knew.
Veiga said in the episode that he didn’t learn until after they agreed to the gig that the conference lineup included Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former Vice President Mike Pence, whom Rosenfeld said he found “a little creepy.” Both men have advanced policies and ideas that are anti-LGBTQ.
Rosenfeld said he had no principled objection to performing for Republicans, or anyone else.
“If the Democrats want to invite me, I will go there,” Rosenfeld said. “If Al-Qaeda wants to invite me, we’re there. A check and a microphone, and I’m there. It’s simple.”
The aside came as Rosenfeld, Veiga and Cohen discussed one of Rosenfeld’s favorite ideas — what he calls “moshiach energy.”
“Moshiach energy,” as Rosenfeld puts it, is akin to the Jewish principle of loving your neighbor as yourself and then putting that energy into the universe in order to bring about the coming of the Messiah. The idea is inspired by the last leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch Orthodox movement, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson — a major source of inspiration for Rosenfeld, who studied at a Lubavitch yeshiva.
Comedian Modi Rosenfeld Rosenfeld speaks with Rabbi Manis Friedman, right, and comedian Periel Aschendbrand on his podcast in November 2021. A portrait of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the last rebbe of the Chabad Orthodox movement, is behind Rosenfeld. (Screenshot via YouTube)
It’s an attitude that he says is embodied by his synagogue, which he has attended since it opened in the 1990s.
“I am so fortunate to belong to a synagogue, Sixth Street Community Synagogue, where when you put moshiach energy out, it comes right back at you,” he said.
Schneerson considered homosexuality a sin and advocated for Jews to choose not to yield to homosexual urges. Last year, on his podcast, Rosenfeld hosted a Chabad rabbi, Manis Friedman, the former translator for the Rebbe, who espouses the same view; he said he finds Friedman inspiring even though he may not agree with all of Friedman’s views. It’s one of many instances where Rosenfeld has been able to square his identities in ways that have proved challenging for others.
Greenberg, the executive director of Eshel, agreed with Rosenfeld’s hypothesis that the Variety article would have little effect on the comedian’s ability to book gigs — and he said Rosenfeld’s commitment to Orthodox ideas and practices could work in his favor.
“Maybe some of those organizations that have hired him before will actually think this is an even more important reason to have him,” Greenberg postulated. “Some people will see this as a kind of affirmative step that you don’t have to abandon your religious identity because you’re gay.”
It’s an idea that is central to one of Rosenfeld’s signature jokes. For him, being Jewish means praying with tefillin every day, eating kosher food and observing Shabbat — while also being married to his husband.
“I always say: the Jewish people — we’re not the chosen people, we’re the choosing people,” Rosenfeld said. “Being Jewish is a lifestyle — like Equinox.”
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He was a privileged Jewish kid from NYC’s Upper East Side. Donald Trump was his greatest invention.
American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump
By Kai Bird with Susan Goldmark
Scribner, $32, 528 pages
By the beginning of the new millennium, Roy Cohn, the red-baiting scourge of the McCarthy hearings, lived largely in the pages of U.S. history books, trotted out on occasion to illustrate how America always manages to overcome its worst nativist impulses. But just in case someone never knew or had forgotten about Cohn’s malign influence on U.S. politics, Tony Kushner brought him back as a villain in his brilliant drama of the early 1990s, Angels in America.
Then, in 2016, Donald Trump was elected president and suddenly, Cohn was breaking news again. The very next year, when Trump was furious at then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from an investigation into whether Russia meddled with the election, the president cried out to his advisers, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?”
Now, as if in answer to that question, Kai Bird has written a magisterial biography of the notorious lawyer and Trump whisperer that is indispensable reading for anyone who wants to understand the current political moment. Bird, the co-author of American Prometheus, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Robert J. Oppenheimer and inspiration for the Oscar-winning movie, began it in 2022, a couple years before Trump’s re-election. He collaborated with his wife, Susan Goldmark, who did the research for this riveting account of the unseemly, outrageous life of the hustler and con man about whom Trump once said, “If you need somebody to get vicious, hire Roy Cohn.”
Though Cohn has been long gone from public life — he died of AIDS at age 59 in 1986, insisting to the very end that he had succumbed to liver cancer — Bird demonstrates how he practically invented the dark political arts of resentment and division adopted by his former client, protégé and future president of the U.S.
Indeed, over the recent 4th of July weekend — decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union — Trump used Cohn’s divisive, inflammatory rhetoric in back-to-back speeches, including one at Mount Rushmore, branding his political opponents as evil, godless communists.
Bird walks us through Cohn’s life decade by decade. He grew up as an only child in a wealthy Jewish family on the Upper East Side and attended elite private schools, where his boyhood friends included Si Newhouse Jr., heir to the Condé Nast media empire, Gene Pope Jr., who would go on to found the National Enquirer, and, improbably, Al Lowenstein, later a well-known liberal Democratic activist and politician.
After Cohn graduated from Columbia Law School, his father, a judge, pulled strings to get him a job in the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, where he made a name for himself as the boy prosecutor who sent Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair in 1953 for passing nuclear secrets to the Soviets. His tactics were highly irregular, including private meetings with the trial judge.
Not long after that, he went to work as chief counsel to Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy, using his position to force U.S.-funded libraries abroad to purge 30,000 books on the flimsy pretext that the authors were communists or Soviet sympathizers. He was also a central figure in the so-called Lavender Scare, when hundreds of federal employees thought to be gay lost their jobs because they were deemed a security risk.
By the 1960s, Cohn was back in New York, hanging out at the Stork Club and 21, squiring Barbara Walters around town, and representing mobsters though still living at home with his mother at 1165 Park Avenue. Over the next decade he would be indicted three times by U.S. Attorney Robert Morgenthau Jr. for bribery, perjury, extortion and other white-collar crimes. In each case, he managed to beat the rap though months before his death he was finally disbarred for unethical conduct.
After Cohn’s mother died in 1967, he moved into a stately townhouse on East 68th Street, where he established his law practice and stopped the pretense of dating women though he never publicly came out as gay. Then, in 1973, Cohn met his most consequential client. At the time, Trump was the 27-year-old son of a Queens real estate mogul trying to break into the Manhattan market and living in a rent-controlled studio on East 75th Street with a view of a water tank on an adjacent building.
Cohn advised the family on how to fight a Justice Department lawsuit accusing the real estate company of violating the Fair Housing Act by refusing to rent to Black tenants. Over the course of the litigation, Cohn taught Trump his signature moves: Keep your name in the paper. Never settle. Countersue. Claim victory. Don’t pay the bills.
Cohn also advised Trump on his first major real estate deal in Manhattan — buying the dilapidated Commodore Hotel on East 42nd Street, next to Grand Central Terminal. To get the deal done, Cohn worked his extensive connections to New York’s first Jewish mayor, Abraham Beame, a player in Democratic machine politics and an old friend of Cohn’s father.
For more than a decade, Trump continued to model himself after his mentor, adopting his penchant for personalized license plates and his snarling, scowling demeanor. Bird argues that in the decades since Cohn died, the McCarthyism of the 1950s has morphed into a nativist, America Firster politics that transformed the Republican Party into one of resentments against the old establishment, multiculturalism, globalization and liberal culture — in other words, the MAGA movement of today.
Cohn’s “values, his unethical behavior, and his political mindset have survived and replaced the values of the establishment he so resented,” Bird writes. “Perhaps his life is proof of the ability of one individual to change the arc of history. Certainly, he gave us the narcissistic politics of Donald Trump.”
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Trump wants to remake Washington — Hitler tried to do the same to Berlin
“It was natural that I also followed my passion for architecture. My faith increased that after many years my dreams would become reality. I was firmly convinced that I would win fame as a builder.”
–Adolf Hitler
“I own buildings. I’m a builder; I know how to build. Nobody can build like I can build.”
–Donald Trump
Adolf Hitler personally drew up architectural plans to remake Berlin into a 1,000-year monument to himself with a three-mile-long “Avenue of Splendors,” on one end an Arch of Triumph that would dwarf the Paris original, and on the other, the domed Hall of the People, which would have been the largest enclosed structure in the world.
Hitler’s grandiose remodeling schemes were suspended in 1943, in order to redirect resources to the war he had begun.
Like Hitler, Donald Trump is also busy designing and creating monuments to himself, including an arch even larger than the one Hitler had planned for Berlin. Unlike Hitler, Trump is proceeding at a fevered pace on completing his legacy projects despite the soaring costs of a war he began.
History is replete with monarchs, emperors, pharaohs and tyrants who sought to immortalize themselves with monuments. In modern times, what sets Trump and Hitler apart is their decision to personally draw up a plan to entirely change the look of a capital city to project their powers.
Hitler began sketching his plans to remake Berlin in the 1920s, years before he came to power. In his postwar book Inside the Third Reich, Hitler architect Albert Speer recalled Hitler showing him two sketches the Nazi leader had already made of his own concept, hoping to recruit the architect to the project. In 1937, the Hitler tasked Speer with making it happen.
Speer started by making a model of the redesigned city, to be renamed Germania. In his book, Speer wrote of Hitler’s glee while inspecting the scaled model.
“He bent down, almost kneeling, his eye an inch or so above the level of the model, in order to have the right perspective, and while looking he spoke with unusual vivacity. These were the rare times when he relinquished his usual stiffness. In no other situation did I see him so lively, so spontaneous, so relaxed,” Speer wrote.
Hitler admired the imperial architectural styles of Rome, Vienna and Paris, but came up with designs for Berlin that were meant to surpass those cities not in elegance, but in expressions of Teutonic power.
The Germania model designed by Speer looks like an elaborate Wagnerian stage set: Visitors disembarking from a new train station would immediately see the 380-foot-tall Arch of Triumph, and as they passed beneath they would follow a wide boulevard lined with about a dozen monumental ministry buildings made of hand-hewn stone, a Soldiers’ Hall with a crypt for the tombs of German field marshals, and, at the terminus of the avenue, the monstrous centerpiece of the whole project — the domed Hall of the People, with enough space to hold 150,000 people.
“He wanted the biggest of everything to glorify his works and magnify his pride,” Speer wrote.
The New Reich Chancellery went up, and some other pieces of Germania were completed. But as Hitler’s regime focused on building concentration camps and death camps, and German invasion forces spread across Europe and the Soviet Union, Hitler had to divert resources to pay for his war crimes.
The Reich suspended work on Germania in 1943. Hitler’s original idea was to complete the transformation in 1950, creating Germania as a new Rome, capital of a vanquished continent. But when the Soviet army entered Berlin, the city had been reduced to ruins. Hitler’s Germania fantasy came to a bloody end on April 30, 1945 when he put a bullet in his head inside the Führerbunker.
Like Hitler, Donald Trump seems to favor classical architectural styles for public buildings, although his love of gaudy glitter – on display inside the White House and at Trump’s own properties — contrasts with Hitler’s preference for a Teutonic austereness.
A few days ago Trump gave the White House press pool a tour of work that he has directed to be done on and around the White House. It reminded me of Speer’s description of Hitler’s glee while inspecting Speer’s model of Germania.
“I’m fixing the country. We’re fixing the White House too. One thing I know how to do is build,” said Trump, who spoke of having columns of the White House repaired, its exterior cleaned, of work on his ballroom and the “military complex” that would be built beneath it. He staged the dog-and-pony show to show off a helipad that was under construction.
“It’s ridiculous the way this place was taken care of. Nobody, including presidents, they didn’t see it. But I see it because I was very good at real estate, like maybe the best in a lot of ways,” said the man who went through multiple bankruptcies and has a history of failed business ventures: Trump University, Trump Steaks, and Trump’s airline, to name only a subset of available examples.
Despite Trump’s boasts, his vanity projects have hit some rough patches. There’s the reflecting pool debacle, a court ruling that his name had to come off the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Some Senate Republicans tried to stop him from spending taxpayer money on his garish ballroom.
But because of a Supreme Court ruling, it looks like the ballroom will go up after all. And Trump is not about to abandon other legacy projects – like his Triumphal Arch, and a National Garden of American Heroes.
Trump’s powers are cracking faster than he can build these monuments to himself. His approval ratings are abysmal. Global respect for America is tanking. Allies who have tried to mollify him are beginning to defy him. Iran has outsmarted him. Former MAGA loyalists like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson have abandoned him. Trump is increasingly looking like an empty shell – a man who has chosen building narcissistic monuments, and corruptly enriching himself and his family, over paying heed to Americans who are suffering because of his self-aggrandizing rule.
Economist Paul Krugman just released a video titled Der Untergang, and subtitled “How badly will Trump punish America?” Der Untergang, German for “downfall,” is the title of a 2004 movie about Hitler’s last days in the Führerbunker. Krugman says that Trump’s obsession with his vanity projects is an indication that Trump knows his powers are rapidly vanishing, and that Trump is becoming perilously desperate.
“In many ways he is behaving like somebody who knows that his days of supreme power are about to end,” Krugman said.
Krugman argues that Trump is showing a deranged proclivity to tear things down rather than preserve them, as evidenced by his demolition of the beloved East Wing. And now Trump is threatening to raze the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, simply because he can’t get his name on it.
History has shown how perilous things can become when a despot finds himself backed into a corner. As we approach the mid-term elections, we should all worry about the wreckage Trump is capable of wreaking while watching his powers vanish. Trump’s downfall, whenever and however it may come, must not also be America’s.
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John Galliano bows out of Met exhibition as backlash over antisemitism mounts
(JTA) — John Galliano withdrew from a planned exhibition of his work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in response to a rapidly escalating controversy over the museum’s decision to honor the fashion designer despite his history of antisemitic and racist remarks.
Galliano said Monday that, after discussions with the Met and others involved in the exhibition, he had decided that it was best for the show not to take place “at this time.” He said he remained accountable for the pain caused by his past words, particularly to Jews and Asians, and recognized that an exhibition honoring his work could be painful for some. The Met said it agreed with his decision.
The reversal came less than a month after the Met announced that Galliano would be the subject of its spring 2027 Costume Institute exhibition, a rare honor that would have made him only the third living designer to receive a solo show there. The exhibition was to open in conjunction with the Met Gala, one of New York’s biggest annual cultural and celebrity events.
Opposition to the exhibition appeared to mount steadily in recent weeks. Early public pushback came from Dana Thomas, Galliano’s biographer, who wrote in an Aug. 6 New York Times guest essay that the Met had made a serious error in choosing to honor him. The criticism then broadened, with Jewish leaders, museum donors and New York politicians publicly urging the museum to reconsider.
Those criticizing the exhibition were New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin, who called the decision deeply painful for Jewish New Yorkers. Prominent Met donor Alice Tisch described the planned exhibition as a “whitewash,” according to the Times.
The reversal is also a setback for Anna Wintour, Condé Nast’s chief content officer and the driving force behind the Met Gala. She had championed Galliano for decades and was among the Met figures most closely associated with bringing the exhibition to the museum.
The controversy was complicated by the fact that some prominent rabbis had actually met with Galliano before the exhibition was announced and had come away believing that his repentance was sincere, as JTA reported earlier this month.
Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, said Galliano had shown the contrition necessary to earn his return to the fashion world. Rabbi Joshua Davidson of Congregation Emanu-El, a Reform synagogue in New York, likewise said he was convinced by Galliano’s statements of remorse and his efforts to educate himself about Judaism and the Holocaust. Neither rabbi endorsed the Met’s decision to honor Galliano, however. Rather, both told the museum that if it proceeded, it had a responsibility to make Galliano’s antisemitic conduct and the lessons of his repentance an explicit part of the exhibition.
That distinction was reflected in the Met’s original plans. Andrew Bolton, the Costume Institute’s curator, said in announcing the exhibition that it would address Galliano’s antisemitic and anti-Asian conduct, as well as his firing from Dior, a hate speech conviction in France and his subsequent treatment for addiction and public acknowledgment of his actions.
Galliano, among the most celebrated designers in the world, was fired by Christian Dior in 2011 after a video surfaced showing him praising Hitler and making antisemitic remarks in a tirade in a Paris cafe, and directing an anti-Asian slur at the partner of a Jewish woman. A French court convicted him of making public insults based on race, religion and ethnicity.
After entering treatment for substance abuse, he embarked on a process of rehabilitation and eventually returned to the fashion industry. Abraham Foxman, then national director of the Anti-Defamation League, met privately with Galliano repeatedly; in 2013 the ADL said that Galliano had demonstrated “true contrition.”
After the initial announcement of the exhibition, Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO and national director of the ADL, noted that the organization had “long since accepted his apology,” but added that he understood “why some Jews may question the decision to include Galliano’s work in an exhibit given the massive spike in antisemitism in recent years.”
In a statement Monday, Greenblatt appeared to take a harder line in welcoming Galliano’s withdrawal.
“With antisemitism at crisis levels, the Met honoring John Galliano at this moment was misguided, and even Galliano ultimately recognized what the Met should have done from the start,” Greenblatt wrote on X. “This was the wrong move at the wrong moment. Timing matters.”
Galliano’s withdrawal leaves the Met without a planned spring 2027 Costume Institute exhibition. The museum said information about a replacement exhibition and the 2027 Met Gala will be announced later.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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