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How Jewish comedy found religion, from Philip Roth to ‘Broad City’
(JTA) — In the 2020 comedy “Shiva Baby,” a 20-something young woman shows up at a house of Jewish mourners and gently offers her condolences. When she finds her mother in the kitchen, they chat about the funeral and the rugelach before the daughter asks, “Mom, who died?”
While “Shiva Baby” explores themes of sexuality and gender, the comedy almost never comes at the expense of Jewish tradition, which is treated seriously by its millennial writer and director Emma Seligman (born in 1995) even as the shiva-goers collide. It’s far cry from the acerbic way an author raised during the Depression like Philip Roth lampooned a Jewish wedding or a baby boomer like Jerry Seinfeld mocked a bris.
These generational differences are explored in Jenny Caplan’s new book, “Funny, You Don’t Look Funny: Judaism and Humor from the Silent Generation to Millennials.” A religion scholar, Caplan writes about the way North American Jewish comedy has evolved since World War II, with a focus on how humorists treat Judaism as a religion. Her subjects range from writers and filmmakers who came of age shortly after the war (who viewed Judaism as “a joke at best and an actual danger at worst”) to Generation X and millennials, whose Jewish comedy often recognizes “the power of community, the value of family tradition, and the way that religion can serve as a port in an emotional storm.”
“I see great value in zeroing in on the ways in which Jewish humorists have engaged Jewish practices and their own Jewishness,” Caplan writes. “It tells us something (or perhaps it tells us many somethings) about the relationship between Jews and humor that goes deeper than the mere coincidence that a certain humorist was born into a certain family.”
Caplan is the chair in Judaic Studies at the University of Cincinnati. She has a master’s of theological studies degree from Harvard Divinity School and earned a Ph.D. in religion from Syracuse University.
In a conversation last week, we spoke about the Jewishness of Jerry Seinfeld, efforts by young women comics to reclaim the “Jewish American Princess” label, and why she no longer shows Woody Allen movies in her classrooms.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity
[Note: For the purpose of her book and our conversation, this is how Caplan isolates the generations: the Silent Generation (b. 1925-45), the baby boom (1946-65), Generation X (1966-79) and millennials (1980–95).]
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Let me ask how you got into this topic.
Jenny Caplan: I grew up in a family where I was just sort of surrounded by this kind of material. My dad is a comedic actor and director who went to [Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey’s] Clown College. My degrees were more broadly in American religion, not Jewish studies, but I was really interested in the combination of American religion and popular culture. When I got to Syracuse and it came time to start thinking about my larger project and what I wanted to do, I proposed a dissertation on Jewish humor.
The key to your book is how Jewish humor reflects the Jewish identity and compulsions of four sequential generations. Let’s start with the Silent Generation, which is sandwiched between the generation whose men were old enough to fight in World War II and the baby boomers who were born just after the war.
The hallmark of the Silent Generation is that they were old enough to be aware of the war, but they were mostly too young to serve. Every time I told people what I was writing about, they would say Woody Allen or Philip Roth, two people of roughly the same generation.
In “Funny, You Don’t Look Funny: Judaism and Humor from the Silent Generation to Millennials,” Jenny Caplan explores how comics treated religion from the end of World War II to the 21st century. (Courtesy)
The Roth story you focus on is “Eli, the Fanatic” from 1959, about an assimilated Jewish suburb that is embarrassed and sort of freaks out when an Orthodox yeshiva, led by a Holocaust survivor, sets up in town.
Roth spent the first 20 to 30 years of his career dodging the claim of being a self-loathing Jew and bad for the Jews. But the actual social critique of “Eli, the Fanatic” is so sharp. It is about how American Jewish comfort comes at the expense of displaced persons from World War II and at the expense of those for whom Judaism is a real thriving, living religious practice.
That’s an example you offer when you write that the Silent Generation “may have found organized religion to be a dangerous force, but they nevertheless wanted to protect and preserve the Jewish people.” I think that would surprise people in regards to Roth, and maybe to some degree Woody Allen.
Yeah, it surprised me. They really did, I think, share that postwar Jewish sense of insecurity about ongoing Jewish continuity, and that there’s still an existential threat to the ongoing existence of Jews.
I hear that and I think of Woody Allen’s characters, atheists who are often on the lookout for antisemitism. But you don’t focus on Allen as the intellectual nebbish of the movies. You look at his satire of Jewish texts, like his very funny “Hassidic Tales, With a Guide to Their Interpretation by the Noted Scholar” from 1970, which appeared in The New Yorker. It’s a parody of Martin Buber’s “Tales of the Hasidim” and sentimental depictions of the shtetl, perhaps like “Fiddler on the Roof.” A reader might think he’s just mocking the tradition, but you think there’s something else going on.
He’s not mocking the tradition as much as he’s mocking a sort of consumerist approach to the tradition. There was this sort of very superficial attachment to Buber’s “Tales of the Hasidim.” Allen’s satire is not a critique of the traditions of Judaism, it’s a critique of the way that people latch onto things like the Kabbalah and these new English translations of Hasidic stories without any real depth of thought or intellect. Intellectual hypocrisy seems to be a common theme in his movies and in his writing. It’s really a critique of organized religion, and it’s a critique of institutions, and it’s a critique of the power of institutions. But it’s not a critique of the concept of religion.
The idea of making fun of the wise men and their gullible followers reminds me of the folk tales of Chelm, which feature rabbis and other Jewish leaders who use Jewish logic to come to illogical conclusions.
Yes.
You write that the baby boomers are sort of a transition between the Silent Generation and a later generation: They were the teenagers of the counterculture, and warned about the dangers of empty religion, but also came to consider religion and tradition as valuable. But before you get there, you have a 1977 “Saturday Night Live” skit in which a bris is performed in the back seat of a luxury car, and the rabbi who performs it is portrayed as what you call an absolute sellout.
Exactly. You know: Institutional religion is empty and it’s hollow, it’s dangerous and it’s seductive.
Jerry Seinfeld, born in 1954, is seen as an icon of Jewish humor, but to me is an example of someone who never depicts religion as a positive thing. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)
“Seinfeld” is more a show about New York than it is necessarily a show about anything Jewish. The New York of Seinfeld is very similar to the New York of Woody Allen, peopled almost entirely by white, middle-class, attractive folks. It’s a sort of Upper West Side myopia.
But there’s the bris episode, aired in 1993, and written by Larry Charles. Unless you are really interested in the medium, you may not know much about Larry Charles, because he stays behind the camera. But he also goes on to do things like direct Bill Maher’s anti-religion documentary “Religulous,” and there’s a real strong case for him as having very negative feelings about organized religion which feels like a holdover from the Silent Generation. And so in that episode you have Kramer as the Larry Charles stand-in, just opining about the barbaric nature of the circumcision and trying to save this poor baby from being mutilated.
The few references to actual Judaism in “Seinfeld” are squirmy. I am thinking of the 1995 episode in which a buffoon of a rabbi blurts out Elaine’s secrets on a TV show. That was written by Larry David, another boomer, whose follow-up series, “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” is similarly known for its irreverence toward Judaism. But you say David can also surprise you with a kind of empathy for religion.
For the most part, he’s classic, old school, anti-organized religion. There’s the Palestinian Chicken episode where the Jews are rabidly protesting the existence of a Palestinian-run chicken restaurant near a Jewish deli, and where his friend Funkhouser won’t play golf on Shabbos until Larry gets permission by bribing the rabbi with the Palestinian chicken. There, rabbis are ridiculous and can be bought and religion is hollow and this is all terrible.
But then there’s this bat mitzvah montage where for one moment in the entire run of this show, Larry seems happy and in a healthy relationship and fulfilled and enjoying life.
That’s where he falls in love with Loretta Black during a bat mitzvah and imagines a happy future with her.
It’s so startling: It is the most human we ever see Larry over the run of the show, and I believe that was the season finale for the 2007 season. It was much more in line with what we’ve been seeing from a lot of younger comedians at that point, which was religion as an anchor in a good way — not to pull you down but to keep you grounded.
So for Generation X, as you write, Judaism serves “real, emotional, or psychological purpose for the practitioners.”
I wouldn’t actually call it respect but religion is an idea that’s not just something to be mocked and relegated to the dustbin. I’m not saying that Generation X is necessarily more religious, but they see real power and value in tradition and in certain kinds of family experiences. So, a huge amount of the humor can still come at the expense of your Jewish mother or your Jewish grandmother, but the family can also be the thing that is keeping you grounded, and frequently through some sort of religious ritual.
Who exemplifies that?
My favorite example is the 2009 Jonathan Tropper novel, “This Is Where I Leave You.” I’m so disappointed that the film adaptation of that sucked a lot of the Jewish identity out of the story, so let’s stick with the novel. In that book, where a family gathers for their father’s shiva, the characters are horrible people in a dysfunctional family writ large. They lie to each other. They backstab each other. But in scene where the protagonist Judd describes standing up on the bimah [in synagogue] to say Kaddish [the Mourner’s Prayer] after the death of his father, and the way he talks about this emotional catharsis that comes from saying the words and hearing the congregation say the words — it’s a startling moment of clarity in a book where these characters are otherwise just truly reprehensible.
Adam Sandler was born in 1966, the first year of Generation X, and his “Chanukah Song” seems like such a touchstone for his generation and the ones that follow. It’s not about religious Judaism, but in listing Jewish celebrities, it’s a statement of ethnic pride that Roth or Woody Allen couldn’t imagine.
It’s the reclamation of Jewish identity as something great and cool and fun and hip and wonderful and absolutely not to be ashamed of.
From left, Ilana Glazer, Abbi Jacobson and Seth Green in an episode of “Broad City” parodying Birthright Israel. (Screenshot from Comedy Central)
Which brings us to “Broad City,” which aired between 2014 and 2019. It’s about two 20-something Jewish women in New York who, in the case of Ilana Glazer’s character, anyway, are almost giddy about being Jewish and embrace it just as they embrace their sexuality: as just liberating. Ilana even upends the Jewish mother cliche by loving her mother to death.
That’s the episode with Ilana at her grandmother’s shiva, which also has the B plot where Ilana and her mother are shopping for underground illegal handbags. They spend most of the episode snarking at each other and fighting with each other and her mother’s a nag and Ilana is a bumbling idiot. But at the moment that the cops show up, and try to nab them for having all of these illegal knockoff handbags, the two of them are a team. They are an absolute unit of destructive force against these hapless police officers.
I think all of your examples of younger comics are women, who have always had fraught relationships with Jewish humor, both as practitioners and as the target of jokes. You write about “The JAP Battle” rap from “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” which both leans into the stereotype of the Jewish-American Princess — spoiled, acquisitive, “hard as nails” — and tries to reclaim it without the misogyny.
Rachel Bloom’s character Rebecca in “Girlfriend” self-identifies as a JAP, but she doesn’t actually fit the category. It’s her mother, Naomi, who truly is the Philip Roth, “Marjorie Morningstar,” Herman Wouk model of a JAP. So Bloom is kind of using the term, but you can’t repurpose the term when the original is still there.
So as an alternative, I offer up a new term: the Modern Ashkenazi American Woman. It’s very New York, it’s very East Coast, it’s very particular to a type of upbringing and community that in the 1950s and ’60s would have been almost exclusively Conservative Jews, and then may have become a bit more Reform as we’ve gotten into the ’90s and 2000s. They went to the JCC. They probably went to Jewish summer camp.
But even that doesn’t even really speak to the American sense of what Jewish is anymore, because American Jews have become increasingly racially and culturally diverse.
There is also something that’s happening historically with Generation X, and that’s the distance from the two major Jewish events of the 20th century, which is the Holocaust and the creation of Israel.
The Silent Generation and baby boomers still had a lingering sense of existential dread — the sense that we’re not so far removed from an attempted total annihilation of Jews. Gen X and millennials are so far removed from the Holocaust that they don’t feel that same fear.
But the real battleground we’re seeing in contemporary American Judaism is about the relationship to Israel. For baby boomers and even for some older members of Gen X, there’s still a sense that you can criticize Israel, but at the end of the day, it’s your duty to ultimately support Israel’s right to exist. And I think millennials and Zoomers [Gen Z] are much more comfortable with the idea of Israel being illegitimate.
Have you seen that in comedy?
I certainly think you can see the leading edge of that in some millennial stuff. The “Jews on a Plane” episode of “Broad City” is an absolute excoriation of Birthright Israel, and does not seem particularly interested in softening its punches about the whole idea of Jews going to Israel. I think we can see a trend in that direction, where younger American Jewish comedians do not see that as punching down.
You’re teaching a class on Jewish humor. What do your undergraduates find funny? Now that Woody Allen is better known for having married his adoptive daughter and for the molestation allegations brought by another adoptive daughter, do they look at his classic films and ask, “Why are you teaching us this guy?”
For the first time I’m not including Woody Allen. I had shown “Crimes and Misdemeanors” for years because I think it’s his most theological film. I think it’s a great film. And then a couple years ago, I backed off, because some students were responding that it was hard to look at him with all the baggage. He’s still coming up in conversation because you can’t really talk about the people who came after him without talking about him, but for the first time I’m not having them actually watch or read any of his stuff.
They have found things funny that I didn’t expect them to, and they have not found things funny that I would have thought they would. They laughed their way through “Yidl mitn fidl,” the 1936 Yiddish musical starring Molly Picon. I also thought they’d enjoy the Marx Brothers’ “Duck Soup” and they did not laugh once. Some of that is the fact that Groucho’s delivery is just so fast.
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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.
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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.
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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.
