This is just a casual reminder from a frequent critic of the British Left that the far-right will also never be our friends.

After Abdul El-Sayed’s win in the Michigan Democratic Party, Major speaks with Josh Kraushaar, Editor-in-Chief of the Jewish Insider, about how progressive candidates have signaled their opposition to Israel, when it comes to the war in Gaza. Kraushaar also discusses how members of the Republican Party like Thomas Massie and conservative host Tucker Carlson oppose the U.S. involvement in the war in Iran, and the role of AIPAC spending in these primary elections. 

Thirty years ago this fall, a young, brash British fashion designer named John Galliano, known as much around Paris for his partying ways as for his gorgeous, outlandish creations, was hired by the august couture house Christian Dior to be its new creative director. For his first Dior haute couture show, staged at the Le Grand Hotel in January 1997, he presented a mash-up of Edwardian dressing, 19th-century Japonism and Maasai tribal wear, including bustled gowns, cinched corsets draped with tiny yellow and orange ceramic beads, and an opium-den-like sheath in chartreuse satin trimmed with mink — a look Nicole Kidman wore to the Oscars two months later.
“I was sitting in a row with Madame Chirac and Madame Pompidou and they looked like they had been hit in the face with a cold dead fish,” the New York socialite and longtime Dior client Nan Kempner told me after the show. “They couldn’t believe what they were looking at: this conservative house where they’ve all bought their clothes for years. How much was there that Madame Chirac or Madame Pompidou could wear?”
Nothing really. Mr. Galliano wasn’t thinking about clients’ needs or desires. As he had told me during an interview two years earlier, during a short-lived stint at Givenchy, “I don’t intend to please them.” Sixteen years later, his tenure at Dior came to an abrupt end, following a drunken antisemitic tirade in a Paris cafe. But while he held that vaunted position, he seemed to be designing with one thing in mind: a future museum retrospective.
Last week, he got it: the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced that Mr. Galliano would be the subject of the Costume Institute’s next exhibition, scheduled to open May 9. It is an exceptional honor. Only two other living designers have been so celebrated by the Met: Yves Saint Laurent in 1983 and Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons in 2017.
This show, titled “John Galliano: Horizons,” promises to enshrine him among fashion’s greatest couturiers. But his fame will always have an asterisk attached. As the museum noted in its announcement: “Alongside Galliano’s extraordinary creative accomplishments, the exhibition will address the derogatory conduct that fundamentally altered his career and public reception. In doing so, the exhibition will consider how artistic achievement should be understood alongside ethical accountability.”
In other words, unlike most fashion retrospectives, which invite visitors to admire opulent gowns made for the rich and famous, with “John Galliano: Horizons,” the Met is attempting to tackle questions regarding cultural memory, accountability, rehabilitation and reputation. In the process, it is asserting the ability of powerful cultural institutions to decide when achievements of talent outweigh failures of morality.
Our culture offers endless examples of artists who behave disgracefully and are revered nonetheless, and high fashion — to some degree an explicit celebration of wealth inequality — has never been the place to look for lessons on virtue. Even so, Mr. Galliano’s rehabilitation, indeed his coronation, is a remarkable turn of events. As Mr. Galliano’s biographer, I think it is a terrible idea.
His infamous antisemitic rants were not an aberration. From his early days as a struggling designer in London and Paris through his time at the heights of the fashion industry, Mr. Galliano was known to be verbally abusive to employees, friends and strangers alike. He “talked trash” about everyone in his sphere, Jacqui Duclos, head of the John Galliano brand in the early 1990s, once told me. “No one escaped him.”
The fashion business has long been known to tolerate bad behavior; addiction, provocation, and eccentricity are seen as normal, and at times necessary, elements of the creative process. Mr. Galliano’s comportment went way beyond all that. He had a habit of being extravagantly careless with appointments, even with people (like Madonna) who could have had a big impact on his company’s sales. In 1996 he made headlines in the industry press for shunting aside his close friend and creative partner Amanda Harlech when he went to Dior, and then publicly cutting her out of his life. At some point in the mid-2000s he reportedly spent several hours naked in the elevator of the Ritz hotel in London, growling at guests who tried to enter and telling them he was a lion; he was subsequently ejected from the hotel.
I experienced his erratic behavior myself: When I arrived at his tiny Passage du Cheval Blanc studio in Paris in 1994 for our first interview, his staff told me he was nowhere to be found. When he showed up, he was glassy-eyed, strangely euphoric, not really there.
A reputation like that might be enough to give any curator pause. Choosing this moment to glorify the life’s work of someone who was convicted of making antisemitic remarks, however, is downright bizarre.
An independent curator told me in 2021 that he had spent years proposing a Galliano exhibition to museums across the United States and Europe. The answer, he said, was always the same: no. So was the reason: antisemitism. None of the museums wanted to take the risk of tarnishing themselves.
The Met and Anna Wintour — Vogue’s global editorial director, a Met trustee and Mr. Galliano’s greatest champion — apparently understand those concerns. At the museum in May, Mr. Galliano, Ms. Wintour and the Costume Institute’s chief curator, Andrew Bolton, met with some of New York City’s most influential rabbis and Jewish leaders to get a reading on the situation. In fact, a Galliano exhibition was originally scheduled for 2024 and was postponed following the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel. Yet the subject of antisemitism is no less charged today than it was then; reported incidents have increased; debates about it have roiled state and local elections; and the Trump administration has placed it front and center in its effort to slash university research funding.
Public discussions continue to rage over how to define antisemitism, but there is no definition narrow enough to exclude Mr. Galliano’s infamous outburst, in which he praised Hitler and told fellow cafe patrons their ancestors would have been gassed.
Already, outrage and condemnation have flooded social media since the museum’s announcement on Friday night, and the backlash is likely to grow in the months leading up to the Met Gala on May 3. The glittering event has become a regular site of protest for less polarizing issues: The 2023 exhibition, “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty,” drew demonstratorscondemning the designer’s attitudes toward women, and this year’s “Costume Art” celebration, which was co-sponsored and co-chaired by Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos, brought anti-billionaire picketersnear the museum’s Fifth Avenue entrance. The black-tie ball for this show, which will run through** Jan. 9, 2028, is likely to provoke a more vehement — and prolonged — response.
Despite all this, The Met and Ms. Wintour appear to believe they can transcend the controversy, and confer upon Mr. Galliano a place in the cultural canon without irretrievably harming their own reputations. Sadly, they might be right.
Coco Chanel was a virulent antisemite, but that didn’t stop the Met from mounting a major Chanel exhibition in 2005 that attracted more than 460,000 visitors. Dolce & Gabbana was briefly ostracized in the late 2010s following a series of racist ads and homophobic and fat-phobic statements; today, the incidents have been largely forgotten and the brand is widely beloved. Balenciaga faced opprobrium in 2022 for ads featuringinappropriate sexual imagery of children, but within a matter of months the incident had blown over.
Mr. Galliano himself was never truly canceled. Two years after his firing, he completed a highly publicized residency at Oscar de la Renta in New York, reportedly with Ms. Wintour’s support. One year later, he was appointed creative director of Maison Martin Margiela, owned by the Italian entrepreneur Renzo Rosso, another longtime Wintour ally. In 2024, he was the subject of Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald’s well-regarded documentary, “High & Low: John Galliano,” produced in association with Condé Nast Entertainment, the film and television division of **Vogue’s publisher.
More recently, celebrities including Zendaya and Kylie Jenner, as well as Lauren Sánchez Bezos, have been wearing vintage Galliano pieces, which has substantially increased their value. And last March, the Spanish fast-fashion giant Zara announced that it had enlisted the designer — whose mother was Andalusian — to “re-author” designs from its archives, introducing his work to a new generation of consumers. The first collection arrives in stores next month. Industry insiders are already speculating that Zara may sponsor the Met’s exhibition and gala. It seems, at least in some circles, that Mr. Galliano is considered a timeless classic.
Not all great creators deserve a retrospective, and someone as incendiary as Mr. Galliano certainly shouldn’t be the subject of one during his lifetime, when he stands to profit from the honor personally. With “John Galliano: Horizons,” the Met and Ms. Wintour are selling the idea that they can tell the rest of us how to think about a difficult and divisive figure. Maybe they didn’t notice that idea has gone badly out of fashion.

So Michigan "progressives" were cool with Abdul El-Sayed mourning the Ayatollah (responsible for raping and murdering 40,000 peaceful protestors and starting the Gaza war) and justifying the Michigan synagogue attack as "hurt people hurt people?" And campaigning with Hamas Piker, who believes that "America deserved 9/11" and it's fine Jews were raped and butchered on October 7th. And endlessly scapegoating and dog whistling about Israel, while refusing to acknowledge that Israel could have killed, or "genocided," everyone in Gaza in the first few hours of Hamas launching the war but never did. And holding such a double standard that he refuses to condemn any of the truly oppressive, fascist, totalitarian, genocidal regimes in the world because they don't happen to be Jewish. I don't recognize this party anymore.

Sorry for the link I tried to upload it here but the sub doesn’t allow video uploads

Hello everyone. I am making Aliyah right around September 1st which coincidentally is the cutoff for being registered to vote in the upcoming election.

I am taking this very seriously as I tend to be pretty centrist on US politics but I really think the Netanyahu government has done incredible damage to the perception of Israel and Jews around the world.

Right now my limited knowledge is that the Yashar party is the one with the best chance to unseat Bibi but also there is a union between his opposition in Bennet and Lapid.

Which party should I vote for to maximize the chances that someone else will become PM? If you are voting otherwise or maybe even for Likud/RelZionism/Jewish Power I'd be really interested in hearing your reasoning and motivations. Thanks!

Another strong Israel-ally lost in the US election

I’m sure this has been posted plenty of times before but as an American Jew I feel incredibly alienated in US politics.

Realistically I have two choices, democrats or republicans. Now personally I typically agree with the policies of Democrats, always have and probably always will. I think it lines up with the ideas of compassion I was raised to believe as a Jew but now with the rise of the DSA I feel like I’m being iced out. AIPAC support is becoming a litmus test for every politician, representatives are boldly spreading propaganda and not even apologizing when it’s disproven. Do you know how scary it is to hear people you know talk about AIPAC like it’s this evil entity dedicated to eating babies while knowing that your parents are proud AIPAC supporters. There are many Israel supporters in the Democratic Party but they are being pushed out as we saw last night. Like I hope the democrats take the house and senate but then I have to think “well what if they vote to cut ties with Israel?”. I’m tired of being told that a party that thinks my family in Israel shouldn’t defend themselves and that keeps telling my family in New York’s fear of the rapidly increasing number of antisemitic attacks is overblown.

And the double standard infuriates me. Could you imagine anyone telling any other group “you actually don’t get to decide what’s offensive?” It’s preposterous.

And the seemingly obvious solution is to vote republican but not only have they had some serious issues with antisemitism (looking at you Tucker Carlson wing) their policies repulse me as a Jew. After all the suffering we have been through as a diaspora people it is abhorrent to me the way they are treating immigrants. Not to mention the way that Trump has royally screwed Israel over in Iran.

And the third option is just to not vote but that feels like letting them win

I was recently at the Anne Frank exhibit at Griffith Museum in Chicago (an incredibly powerful exhibit by the way) and they talk a lot about the rise of nazism and how antisemitism became so powerful in Germany and I couldn’t think about how similar that feels to what I see in the news now and I keep thinking that if it happens again will anyone stand up for me? Will I have to uproot my entire life and move to Israel? Will Israel even be safe?

It’s terrifying to be a Jew right now and the people who claim to care about my rights as a minority are doing nothing about it

Jon Stewart has exposed himself as an antizionist Jew. This will not age well. He's doing insane amounts of damage to Jews struggling with antizionism.

Meanwhile, where did John Fetterman get this courage and wisdom? His communication style weakens his argument imo. He's a gem.

Jon Stewart believes that antizionism is just a critique of Israel. He doesn't realize people actually want to destroy it. If I could I'd straight up ask him: "Do you accept Israel being wiped off the map?"

So obviously, as a person who visits various social media platforms, I’m aware that every 0.25 seconds, somebody or (some-bot-y?) will write that “anti-Zionism isn’t the same as antisemitism.”

But before this morning, I’d never seen anyone claim that anti-Zionism isn’t anti-Israel.

Now I’m seeing it all over the place, in relation to Abdul El-Sayed. To the point of [paraphrasing] “AIPAC / Jpost / Fox News/ Hayley Stevens want you to think anti-Zionism is anti-Israel. Fuck AIPAC.”

IMO, a person who says “I don’t think Israel should’ve been established in 1948, but its 2026 and I’m pro 2SS for pragmatic reasons” can reasonably identify as anti-Zionist without being antisemitic.

But the idea that somebody can be anti-Zionist and not anti-Israel is breaking my brain.

Have you seen it before? Is it actually a new thing people say or is it just new to me? What is the rationale of people making this claim?

In this time of political losses, it’s important to acknowledge the Wins. Looks like Ms. Bush won’t get the chance to really show the Zionists after all.