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 the war in Gaza sparked by Hamas on October 7, 2023, but fanned by anti-Israel rhetoric that is often indistinguishable from bigotry against Jews.

Accordingly, the debate over Galliano’s return to fashion — he recently signed a multiyear 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 authorities, from the medieval sage Maimonides to the 21st-century author 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 surfaced online showing 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 in the cafe incident of making public insults based on race, religion or ethnicity 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 for him to ask retailers to again stock his........

© The Times of Israel