Uncategorized
What American Jews fight about when they fight about Israel
(JTA) — Eric Alterman, born in 1960, says the view of Israel he absorbed growing up in a Jewish family in suburban Scarsdale, New York, was decidedly one-sided.
“I went on this nerdy presidential classroom thing when I was in high school,” he recalls, “and some Christian kid from the South raised his hand and said to the rabbi, ‘I don’t get it, if the Jews could have a state, why can’t the Palestinians?’ And I was like, ‘How dare you?’”
Alterman would go on to attend Cornell University, where he wrote his honors thesis on Israel, Vietnam and neoconservatism; spend a semester abroad at Tel Aviv University; study Israeli military history while earning his master’s degree in international relations at Yale, and research a dissertation on American liberalism and the founding of Israel as a doctoral student at Stanford.
Although he frequently writes about Israel as a contributing writer at the Nation and the American Prospect, Alterman is best known for his liberal analysis of the media and U.S. politics. He’s written 11 previous books, including one on Bruce Springsteen.
Yet he never stopped thinking about the widening gap between the idealized Israel of his youth and the reality of its relations with the Palestinians, its Arab neighbors and the West. Even when Israel’s revisionist historians were uncovering evidence of massacres and forced expulsions of Palestinians during the War of Independence, and Israeli politicians and intellectuals began asking why, indeed, the Palestinians didn’t deserve a state of their own, he saw that such discussions were considered blasphemous in most American Jewish circles.
Alterman, now a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College, explores that gap in his latest book, “We Are Not One: A History of America’s Fight Over Israel.” The book surveys U.S.-Israel relations, but with a focus on the ways defending Israel have shaped public discourse. It’s a book about arguments: within the administrations of 14 presidents, between Washington and Jerusalem, and mostly among Jews themselves.
Earlier this month we spoke about how the pro-Isael lobby became a powerful political force, the Jewish organizations and pundits who fight to limit the range of debate over Israel, and what he thinks is the high price American Jews have paid for tying their identities so closely to Israel.
“I try to take on shibboleths that in the past have shut down conversation and take them apart and sympathetically show the complexity of the actual situation that lies beneath — so that [criticism and disagreement] over Israel can be understood rather than whisked away by changing the subject, or what-aboutism, or by demonizing the person who is raising them,” said Alterman.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Let me start by congratulating you: It’s the first book about U.S.-Israel relations with a chapter named after a Bruce Springsteen album: “Working on a Dream.”
Eric Alterman: Nobody else has caught that. But it’s not about U.S.-Israel relations. It’s the first book about the debate over Israel in the United States. There’s a million books on U.S.-Israel relations.
So let’s define that more narrowly. The title reminds me of the United Jewish Appeal slogan over the years, “We Are One,” which was about American Jewish solidarity. So who is the “we” in your title, “We Are Not One”?
There are three or four different meanings. The “we” in this book are obviously the United States and Israel. An awful lot of people argue that the United States and Israel have identical interests in the world and that’s crazy, because Israel is this tiny little country in the Middle East and we’re a global superpower thousands of miles away. So obviously, we’re going to have differences. Number two, American Jews and Israeli Jews are very different people. They have very different life experiences. And they see things quite differently as evidenced by the political split between them. The title also refers specifically just to Americans, because we can’t even discuss most things anymore. The pro-Israel community, such as it ever was, is enormously split and it’s split in angry ways.
Much of your book is about what happens to American Jews when the idealized portrait of Israel’s founding and its presumed blamelessness in its actions toward the Palestinians comes up against reality. In that context, tell me a little about your choice to devote a chapter to the Leon Uris novel “Exodus,” an extremely sanitized version of Israel’s founding, and the 1960 movie based on it.
The influence of “Exodus” is something I didn’t understand until I wrote the book. It’s crazy, because Leon Uris was this egomaniac who wrote kind of a shitty book and said that he wanted to add a new chapter to the Bible, and he kind of succeeded. I was born in 1960. When I was growing up in suburban New York, every single family had “Exodus” on their shelves. When the movie came out Israelis understood this. They said, “We can just shut down our public relations office now.” And from the standpoint of reality the movie is worse than the book because it has Nazis — the Arabs in the book are working with Nazism. Uris didn’t have the nerve to do that. So the book created this idealized Israel and this idea of [Palestinians as] evil, subhuman Nazis.
What most Americans don’t understand, or choose not to understand, is that before the 1940s most Jews were anti-Zionist, or non-Zionist. This changed in the 1940s, when, as a result in part of the Holocaust, and the reaction to that, and the triumph of Zionists, they became intensely pro-Zionist, leading up to the creation of Israel. But after that, they kind of forgot about Israel. One might have given their children JNF boxes to carry on Halloween instead of UNICEF boxes, or maybe they paid to plant trees. But Israel doesn’t show up in the American Jewish Committee’s 1966 annual report until page 35 or 36, and Nathan Glazer’s 1957 book “American Judaism” says that the creation of the Jewish state has had “remarkably slight effects on the inner life of American Jewry.”
With the events of 1967, Uris’ idealized notion of Israel came together with this terrible fear of a second Holocaust, and the terror and shame and frightening nature of that combined to transform American Judaism overnight to an enormous degree.
You are referring to Israel’s lightning victory in the Six-Day War, which even non-religious Jews saw as a kind of miracle, and redemption two decades after the Holocaust. And that transformation, you argue, put defense of Israel, combined with Holocaust consciousness, at the center of Jewish identity.
More than just the center: It basically comprised almost all of it, for many secular Jews. I quote the neoconservative Irving Kristol in the book saying in 1976 that “the Holocaust and the founding of the state of Israel” was 100% of what Judaism means.
Which in turn led to a the tremendous pro-Israel lobbying efforts, political activism and punditry.
The budgets of American Jewish organizations overnight went from social services and liberal social justice causes to defense of Israel. And rabbis were replaced at the center of public discourse by the heads of these organizations — most of whom had no religious training or knowledge of history or Judaism.
Joe Biden, then vice president, speaks at the AIPAC 2016 Policy Conference in Washington, DC, March 20, 2016.
(Molly Riley/AFP via Getty Images)
One distinction you repeatedly make is between what most Jews believe compared to the Jewish organizations that claim to represent them. Surveys show the rank and file is consistently more liberal on Israel and less hawkish than the big organizations — a gap that showed up markedly around the Iraq War and the Iran nuclear deal.
Right. The big mistake that so many in the media make is that they go to the heads of these organizations who pretend to speak for American Jews when they don’t speak for American Jews. They speak for their boards and their donors.
The shift to Jewish lobbying on behalf of Israel coincides with an era in which there is seldom daylight between what Israel wants and what the United States wants or agrees to — often to the frustration of presidents. You are critical of those who exaggerate the pro-Israel lobby’s influence — folks like Stephen Walt and John J. Mearsheimer, authors of the 2007 book “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” — but, at the same time, you write, referring to the Israel debate in America, about “the continued stranglehold that money, power, organizational structure, and clearly defined paths to personal career advancement continue to hold over the shape of foreign policy.” How will you respond to critics who will say your book is trafficking in the myth of Jewish power and its conspiracy-minded hold over American policy?
The short answer is, that’s why I wrote a 500-page book — basically, for two reasons: One, everything is incredibly complicated. And some of those complications are consistent with antisemitic myths, and therefore they have to be teased out and broken down in such a way that you’re telling the truth rather than portraying the myth.
If you say things without context, they sound antisemitic. I say that yes, Jews are very powerful in the media and many use that power on or about Israel. But I think if you lay out the examples that I use, if you look at them and examine them, I don’t see how you can conclude otherwise. The people I describe often say that about themselves — how much power and influence they yield.
Secondly, I’ve always found it just about impossible to discuss Israel with anyone, because you have to share exactly the same assumptions with that person. And if you don’t, then they take it personally, or you’re an antisemite, or, at best, you’re insufficiently sensitive to how important antisemitism is. And if you describe ways in which American Jews act in ways that are consistent with antisemitic myth, it has a way of shutting down the conversation.
Undoubtedly there’s some criticism of Israel that is motivated by antisemitism, but there’s an awful lot of reasons to be critical of Israel, particularly if you are a Palestinian or care about Palestinians. This accusation [antisemitism] has shut down the discourse and part of my hopes in demonstrating the complexities of this history is to open this up.
So let me ask about your own stake in this. Your educational background and relationship to Israel are similar in many ways to the writers and thinkers in your book who tolerate no criticism of Israel. I don’t know if you call yourself a Zionist, but you have some connection to Israel, and you’re also willing to tolerate critiques of Israel. What’s the difference between you and some of the other people who went on the same journey?
For the longest time I was comfortable with the words “liberal Zionist,” but I don’t think they have any meaning anymore. I don’t think it’s possible to be a liberal Zionist — you have to choose. Israel is the only putatively democratic country that prefers Trump to either Obama or Biden, and it’s not even close. And young Israelis are moving further in that direction and young American Jews are moving further in the opposite direction.
So you ask me if I am a liberal Zionist. I don’t think the word “Zionist” is useful at all anymore, because Israel is a country and it’s not going anywhere. I sometimes call myself an anti-anti-Zionist, because anti-Zionism is dumb. I’m very anti-BDS. If I thought [the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement] could end occupation, I would support it, even though the idea of boycotting Jews puts a bad taste in my mouth. But the theory behind BDS apparently, and I’ve spent a lot of time on this, is that the world will force Israel to give up its identity and turn the country over to its enemies. It’s inconceivable that Israel would do that and inconceivable the United States would pressure them to do that. So BDS is entirely performative. It’s more of a political fashion statement than anything else.
And to me, it speaks to the failure of Palestinian politics throughout history. I have a great deal of sympathy for the Palestinians and their bad politics because it’s based on two problems. One is that they have never been able to see the future very well. So they should have agreed in 1921 and 1937, or whenever they would have had the majority and they were being given a country by the British. They should have taken the lousy offer from Ehud Barak and Bill Clinton in 2000. I kind of get it because they have so many competing constituencies, and it’s impossible to satisfy all of them at the same time. I understand that. It’s hard to imagine a Palestinian politician who could say yes, and if you look at Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, in both cases, it’s hard to imagine making peace with them.
I read that in your book, and my first thought was, well, isn’t that basically just confirming what the pro-Israel right has always said — that Israel has no partner for peace? So maybe the best it can do is maintain a status quo that assures some security for Israel and a workable something for the Palestinians.
Well, number one I hold Israel significantly responsible for the conditions under which that has developed and that they can change those. And number two, that’s no excuse for the way Palestinians are treated, either in the occupation or in Israel. So yes, I agree. There’s no one to make peace with today, but there are many steps Israel could take that could vastly improve the lives of the Palestinians, both in the occupied territories and inside Israel. And there are a lot of steps they could take that could build confidence for a future that could weaken Hamas, that could strengthen the Palestinian Authority, so that one day peace would be possible. But they do the opposite.
An Israel supporter at a New York rally to tell the United Nations “no more anti-Israel documents or resolutions,” Jan. 12, 2017. (Don Emmert/AFP via Getty Images)
You talk about funding of Israel studies and Jewish studies departments as a reaction against fears of a pro-Palestinian takeover of academia. At the same time, you write how Palestinian supporters “succeeded in colonizing Middle East studies departments, student faculty organizations, and far-left political organizations.” Why does that matter in the long run if, as you also write, nothing’s really going to change American policy on Israel?
I gave a talk before the book came out at Tel Aviv University and someone asked me that question. I said, You care about these transformations for two reasons. One, you really will be all alone in the world. You’ll have the support of conservative [Evangelical] Christians who are in many respects antisemitic and are using you for their own purposes. So if you lose American Jews, you will be existentially alone in a way you’re not now and that strikes me as very unpleasant.
I do think that the quote-unquote pro-Israel community has a stranglehold on American politics that I can’t see changing anytime soon, and I think the change in the Democratic Party [that it will turn more pro-Palestinian] is very much exaggerated by both sides for their own reasons.
That being said, the people who are being trained now to be in the State Department and the National Security Council and the Defense Department and the think tanks and the places where the intellectual foundation of U.S. policy is made are learning something very different from what you and I learned in college. Right now, there’s no such thing as an influential Palestinian lobby in this country. There’s no pushing back. There’s no percentage for anyone opposing Israel who has a career interest in the future. That will change, and the whole shaping of the discourse will change and that will change the relationship between the United States and Israel. It’s not going to happen anytime soon, but it’s definitely going to happen.
As Jews in this country have remained largely liberal, Israel appears to be getting more illiberal, as we’ve seen with a new government that is more right-wing than any previously. And Israel has become more of a divisive element among Jews than a unifying force. As this gap appears to be widening, do you have any real hope for changing the discourse?
No, I don’t have any hopes for that. I don’t have anything optimistic to say about Israel. I think, politically speaking, from the standpoint of American Jews, everything is going in the wrong direction. But by demonstrating just how different Israeli Jews are than American Jews, and how little Israeli Jews care what American Jews think, I do think that it presents an opportunity for American Jews to think about what it means to be an American Jew in the Diaspora. Roughly half of the Jews in the world live in the United States. And since 1967 American Jews have defined themselves vicariously through Israeli Jews and taking pride in Israel. They expressed their identities by defending Israel and attacking the media when the media didn’t defend Israel.
Meanwhile, American Jews hardly ever go to synagogue. According to Pew, 20% of American Jews regularly attend synagogue and half of them are Orthodox, who are 10% of the community. What brought me back into Judaism was studying Torah. And hardly any American Jews are ever exposed to that.
So I think there’s an opportunity to reimagine Diaspora Jewry now that the Israel story doesn’t work, and it’s clear that it doesn’t work. Young American Jews are leaving or voting with their feet. They’re walking away. Israel-centric Judaism is in part responsible, although it’s not the whole story. Intermarriage is a big part of the story. The de-religionization of all groups is part of the story. But personally, I don’t see what a liberal American Jew would see in a Judaism that defines itself as it has for the past 50 years as defending Israel and remembering the Holocaust.
—
The post What American Jews fight about when they fight about Israel appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Cori Bush promised to bury AIPAC. Her rematch with Wesley Bell in Missouri tests that.
(JTA) — Missouri primary voters will travel back two years when they head to the polls on Tuesday. There they’ll confront a rematch of two candidates whose previous face-off was largely defined by an influx of AIPAC cash that helped oust one of Israel’s most ardent critics in Congress.
In 2024, AIPAC “demonstrated its clout,” in the words of The New York Times, with a massive contribution that knocked out incumbent U.S. Rep. Cori Bush in favor of challenger Wesley Bell. In her concession speech, she promised revenge.
On Tuesday, Bush is seeking to make good on the pledge. But while she is competing against the same candidate, the political landscape around them has changed dramatically.
Since Bush’s loss in the district representing the St. Louis metropolitan region, AIPAC has become a bogeyman in the Democratic Party and Israel a major campaign issue. Other anti-Zionist members of the Democratic Socialists of America have been racking up victories in blue districts across the country throughout the 2026 primary season.
The changing winds might have given Bell incentive to shift to the left instead of leaving himself vulnerable to a challenger whose background and political stances are otherwise similar. But Bell has held firm in his support for Israel, enjoying the backing of mainstream Democrats and a continued financial infusion from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to the tune of more than $1 million this cycle.
As a result, Tuesday’s rematch is one of the most striking tests of whether AIPAC still has traction in Democratic strongholds or whether Bush and other DSA candidates have subdued the once-powerful lobby.
“The war is a lot different today than it was two years ago,” Braxton Payne, a St. Louis-based Democratic strategist, told JTA, referring to the Israel-Gaza conflict that unfolded following Hamas’s attack on Oct. 7, 2023, and the ensuing war. “Sentiment inside the Democratic Party, even among the establishment, has changed.”
In the past few years, the AIPAC has faced growing hostilities from ultra-left-wing politicians, who have denounced Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, particularly in the aftermath of Oct. 7.
“AIPAC is now a household name in Democratic politics,” Payne noted.
But heading into Tuesday’s primaries, it wasn’t clear that the anti-AIPAC activism had moved the needle for St. Louis voters. While the polymarket prediction platform has given Bell a 66% chance of winning, compared to Bush’s 34%, there’s a dearth of nonpartisan polling. Bush’s campaign commissioned one of the few publicly available survey results, an April HIT Strategies poll that declared the candidates “statistically tied,” with Bell in the lead at 44% and Bush at 40%.
On paper, the two candidates have much in common. Born in Missouri in the mid-1970s, Bell and Bush are both Black progressive Democrats who entered politics following the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in the city of Ferguson.
After protests for police reforms surged across the area for about a year, Bell won a seat on the city council and worked on enacting such changes. In a 2018 race for St. Louis County prosecutor, he defeated Bob McCulloch, a 27-year incumbent who had come under national scrutiny for failing to prosecute the officer who had killed Brown. Bell is now serving his first term in Congress.
Bush, meanwhile, first became engaged in politics as a participant in the Ferguson protests. Though she lost Democratic primaries for the U.S. Senate and House in 2016 and 2018, success in 2020 led her to serve Missouri’s 1st Congressional District for two terms. But in 2024, Bush fell short, losing in the primaries to Bell by more than 5 percentage points.
The candidates agree on most of their political platforms, both of which prioritize issues like reproductive freedom, gun violence prevention and the dismantling of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as well as reducing the costs of housing, utilities, healthcare and prescriptions. But they diverge when it comes to the Middle East, with Bush’s campaign promising to “stand for justice in Palestine.”
Like other DSA candidates in New York, Colorado, Wisconsin and Michigan, Bush’s campaign accuses Israel of carrying out a genocide in Gaza with the backing of “U.S. weapons and U.S. dollars.”
Following her loss to Bell in 2024, Bush threatened to tear down AIPAC’s “kingdom” after it spent nearly $9 million on her takedown, in one of the most expensive House races in U.S. history. Federal Election Commission records show that of that total, AIPAC invested about $3.4 million in support of Bell and about $5.2 million in opposition of Bush, through the lobby’s super PAC, the United Democracy Project.
“People are beginning to understand that — much like the crypto industry, AI, Big Oil, and Big Pharma — AIPAC has become yet another way for MAGA-donors to divide the Democratic base by meddling in primaries,” Bush told JTA in a written statement.
“In St. Louis and across the country, people know that our fight against antisemitism means fighting against the far-right’s effort to divide us,” Bush added.
Throughout her current rematch against Bell, Bush has gone after her opponent for his ties to AIPAC.
“Wesley Bell is a former Republican campaign manager who is bought and paid for by AIPAC,” Bush posted last month on X. Bush was referring to a 2006 period when Bell served as campaign manager for a conservative, which he has maintained was no more than a favor for a friend.
“We’re going back to DC, and we’ll do it with no corporate cash or AIPAC funded-trips,” Bush added, referencing Bell’s trip to Israel with the lobby group last year.
Yet compared to 2024, AIPAC has spent much less on the current race. Through its UDP super PAC, the lobby has invested in the neighborhood of $3 million in the rematch, with the vast majority spent opposing Bush, according to FEC data. Overall in this race, the candidates themselves have also raised fewer funds than they did two years ago, according to the FEC. Bell has secured $3.6 million and Bush $1.3 million, as opposed to $5.4 million and $4.2 million, respectively, in 2024.
Deryn Sousa, spokesperson for AIPAC, told JTA in a written statement that his group was proud to support Bell’s campaign.
“Bell is a principled fighter for the people of St. Louis, while Cori Bush spent her time in Congress missing votes and demonizing a key democratic ally,” Sousa added.
Bell did not respond to a request for comment from JTA.
However, on the campaign trail, Bell said he was “proud to stand with our Jewish brothers and sisters, and support Israel, particularly in a time that has been very tumultuous,” in a March video posted by AIPAC.
“When we see what has happened in the last few years, I think it’s even more apropos to stand with our friends and one of our greatest allies,” he continued. “Oftentimes, what gets lost is yes, we support Israel, but Israel also supports us.”
And in Congress, Bell voted last month against an amendment that aimed to cut military aid to Israel. He has also previously co-sponsored a bill to increase defense partnerships with Israel, while also voting in favor of legislation that would have sanctioned the International Criminal Court for seeking to arrest U.S. allies, including Israeli officials.
David Cohen, executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of St. Louis, which does not endorse candidates, said the recent Iran war transformed “a national conversation about the Middle East into something more common.”
“The sheer number of conversations on this topic compared to the last race look different,” Cohen said. “The confluence of conspiracy theorists from the left and the right have blown out of proportion since the war started.”
Within these national conversations, which he described as “catchy” talking points and “black and white” discussions about AIPAC and Israel, Cohen warned that certain campaigns are “playing that dangerous game of demonizing Jews.”
Cohen said he believes that Bush’s campaign decided to focus on Israel because “they thought it would get her traction,” as opposed to focusing on the “many issues that people in Missouri care about.” Payne echoed Cohen’s sentiments, stressing that he “wouldn’t consider the Israeli-Hamas conflict as the top issue” at the ballot box amid higher-priority concerns like the “insane” cost of living. He noted that Bush’s “central campaign issue is AIPAC money,” a message that “motivates her base” but might not sway the everyday voter.
Jewish leaders and activists in the state have followed the race closely. Rabbi Ze’ev Smason, president of the Coalition for Jewish Values – Missouri, told JTA in an email that his organization also doesn’t endorse candidates. But the difference between Bell and Bush, he said, was obvious to his regional chapter of a national Orthodox rabbinic group.
While Bell “supports Israel’s right to self-determination” and to exist as a Jewish nation, Bush has “established an adversarial relationship with Israel abroad, as well as with the overwhelming majority of her Missouri constituents,” according to Smason.
“At home in her district, Cori Bush was a ‘no-show’ for her Jewish constituents,” Smason stated. “She regularly refused requests for interviews from the local Jewish press, and was shockingly absent from the dedication ceremony of the Holocaust Museum and Learning Center, with no explanation.”
Cohen, whose JCRC branch serves 36 Jewish groups from “liberal to Conservative to Orthodox,” said that “almost none of them believe what Cori Bush believes about Israel.” Jews made up 4.1% of the population in the district as of 2024, according to the Berman Jewish DataBank.
On the other hand, Michael Berg, a volunteer for St. Louis Jewish Voice for Peace, which is not a JCRC member, is among a minority of organized Jewish voices who oppose Bell due in large part to the candidate’s support for Israel. It was upsetting, Berg said, that Bell was “perfectly willing to take $15 million from the interests of a foreign government that’s committing a genocide.”
For Berg, the Israel-Gaza conflict is by no means a fringe concern. He praised Bush for her “unwavering advocacy” for a Gaza ceasefire and support for “multi-ethnic democracy,” as well as her refusal to accept corporate funds, her commitment to fighting climate change and her history of standing up for the interests of St. Louis’s people.
Bush has also earned the support of a second local Jewish group, Progressive Jews of St. Louis, who described her as “a champion for our St. Louis community and a brave leader in the fight for justice and peace for all people, regardless of where they call home.”
Out-of-state Jewish groups have also been vocal about their stances on this race, with the vast majority backing Bell, but some groups, like the IfNotNow movement, advocating for Bush. The Washington, D.C.-based IfNotNow, which calls for “a thriving future for all Israelis and Palestinians,” praised Bush for leading “the call for a ceasefire in Congress.”
In contrast, Jacob Spiegel, communications director of the Washington-based Jewish Democratic Council of America, recounted his organization’s grassroots action in favor of Bell. A network of volunteers, he explained in an email, is working to “elect the candidate we believe aligns with our Jewish values.”
Nonetheless, Berg maintained that even if Bell wins this race, the future “of the Democratic Party is only going in one direction,” which he said is the “direction of Democratic socialism.”
“The United States is increasingly becoming an anti-Zionist country,” Berg said. “The people understand they do not want the United States to continue to fund and support an ethno-national state in the Middle East that oppresses half of its people.”
Regardless of who is victorious, Payne predicted that the outcome would give “fodder” to the triumphant side. Payne, who noted his position as a non-Jewish “outsider,” said he believes that a fear of antisemitism will be motivating many Jewish voters as they head to the polls.
“To be frank, I think it’s a fear that it’s not ill-placed or unfounded,” he added.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Cori Bush promised to bury AIPAC. Her rematch with Wesley Bell in Missouri tests that. appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
The Met’s plan to honor designer John Galliano puts Jewish ideas of repentance to the test
(JTA) — 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.”
Scarlett Johansson at the Metropolitan Museum of Art gala in New York City, May 7, 2018. The extravaganza is the kick-off event for each year’s annual Costume Institute exhibit. (Noam Galai/Getty Images for New York Magazine)
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.
“I’m certainly immersed in the fight against antisemitism and appreciate the importance of pushing back against it and just the dangers of this moment,” he said. “I think we have bigger issues than what, however bad it was, John Galliano did a decade and a half ago.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post The Met’s plan to honor designer John Galliano puts Jewish ideas of repentance to the test appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Spike in number of Israelis leaving country may be harmful to security and economy, new study warns
(JTA) — Israelis are exiting the country in high numbers, a trend that could harm the state’s future security and economy, according to a new demography study published Tuesday by Tel Aviv University.
It showed that 268,509 Israelis left the country for a period of at least three consecutive months from 2023 to 2025, part of a spike that began after 2020 during the COVID pandemic.
“Even in 2025, the number of Israelis who left the country for a significant period of time is very worrying,” particularly coming on top of the number from the two prior years, said Itai Ater, one of the authors.
These numbers do not yet pose a risk, he explained. But he added that there is a “growing concern” that “immigration from Israel will increase in a way that will endanger security and the Israeli economy.”
In 2020, only 38,764 Israelis left for a three month period or more, the lowest such number since the start of the study in 2009, when 65,014 Israelis were absent for three consecutive months or more.
The numbers spiked rapidly from 2020, rising to 53,559 in 2021, then up to 66,966 the next year.
The leap was more dramatic in 2023, the year that saw pro-democracy protests sweep the country followed by the Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel and wars with Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
That year, 86,509 Israelis were absent for three consecutive months or more, a 29.1% [[increase?]] from 2022, with the numbers then beginning to level off, rising to 91,499 in 2024 and then dropping slightly to 90,922 in 2025.
Data collected on those out of the country for 12 consecutive months was similar to the data for the three month periods, albeit with lower numbers. There was the same low drop in 2020 down to 24,400, followed by a rise to 32,036 in 2021, with an additional increase to 35,698 in 2022. The numbers spiked to 49,925 in 2023 and remained high, with 49,677 absent for at least a year in 2024.
The 2025 data won’t be available until 2027, but those conducting the study, professors Ater and Nittai Bergman, along with doctoral student Doron Zamir, said they believe it will remain high.
The researchers explained that the issue of Israeli emigration to countries abroad has long occupied the public discourse in Israel, with specific concern regarding the resulting “brain drain.”
Emigration is an issue for many countries, the researchers acknowledged, but said its impact is felt more keenly in Israel, which lacks abundant natural resources and depends heavily on human intellectual capital to field critical industries such as high tech and health.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Spike in number of Israelis leaving country may be harmful to security and economy, new study warns appeared first on The Forward.
