Like most New Yorkers, I love the Met. I raised my three children in Manhattan and would take them to the Met often. I loved turning them into art lovers from an early age and never took for granted the privilege of having some of the world’s most magnificent art as part of our city.
In my professional life, I direct Yad Vashem’s foundation in the United States, whose mission is dedicated to remembering the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. I am also the child and grandchild of Holocaust survivors.
That is what makes what The Met just did so painful.
This week, John Galliano withdrew from a planned retrospective of his work at the Met, after donors and Jewish leaders objected and City Council Speaker Julie Menin called the exhibition a “gut punch” to the Jewish community.
But the exhibition’s death does not answer the question it raised. The most prestigious cultural institution in America chose to honor a man who said he “loved Hitler,” in the city that is home to more Jews and more Holocaust survivors than any other in the country, and it took a public outcry to stop it. The withdrawal is not the end of this story. It is the beginning of holding an institution accountable. The Met owes New York an answer: how did this happen at all?
I am not here to judge Galliano. Whether he has done the work to repent for his words is his own reckoning. He paid a real price at the time. Dior fired him. A French court convicted him. He spent years outside the industry before returning to Maison Margiela. Personal redemption is possible, and no one should be eager to declare it out of reach.
But a retrospective at The Met is not a second chance. It is an honor. When a museum of this stature devotes an exhibition to a living figure, it is not merely displaying his work. It is elevating him. It is telling the public: here is a person to look up to.
An institution cannot make that gesture and treat the recipient’s history as a footnote. Yet that is how this exhibition was framed. The Met’s own materials called Galliano “one of the most inventive and influential designers of the past four decades” and reduced his antisemitism to “derogatory conduct.”
The Met heard from Jewish leaders as this exhibition took shape. The reality did not sink in. This was not malice. It was a lack of sensitivity to the people for whom “I love Hitler” is not a celebrity scandal but the sound of their families’ childhoods. It should not have taken public pressure for the museum to hear them.
There is still a right way for this to end. Not with quiet relief that the exhibition resolved itself, but with a plain acknowledgment to survivors and their family and to the Jewish community at large, that planning it caused real pain, and a commitment to do better in the future.
Bestowing an honor is a deliberate decision, and every institution should think carefully about what that means. There are real consequences that institutions must understand before they act, not after. This is especially true when the people who bear those consequences are Holocaust survivors, their children and grandchildren and none of us should have to explain why “I love Hitler” is disqualifying.
New Yorkers deserve better, we deserve institutions that understand that without being asked.
Major is the national director of Yad Vashem USA Foundation.