Me and My Kippah
An Exercise in Ambivalence
Recently, I watched a short video of a young Jewish university student passionately addressing pro-Palestinian protestors.1 His words were forceful, his ideas clear, but what I most noticed was that he was proudly sporting his kippah (yarmulke for the uninitiated). It made me proud to watch him—and a little ashamed.
I always keep my head covered because that’s a basic guideline of religious Judaism, but I don’t always wear a kippah.
Sometimes, I go about my business in the world sporting the skullcap, and sometimes, I hide it under or simply substitute a baseball hat. Often, I wear a bandanna. Why? Partly in honor of my two heroes, Hulk Hogan and David Foster Wallace, but mostly because it keeps the sweat out of my eyes and doesn’t fall off whenever I lean over.2
Sometimes, the bandana is more convenient. Sometimes, I need a hat to keep the sun off my exposed ears. But often, truth be told, I just don’t want to call attention to the fact that I’m a Jew.
It’s not that I’m afraid of being a Jew publicly, I mean not in the sense of fearing violence. But I do often feel when I walk into a store wearing a kippah that people will no longer see me as just another person but primarily, if not exclusively, as a Jew, and that makes me self-conscious. Whatever their feelings are about Jews, good or ill, they will now be transferred onto me. And do I really need that?
And there’s the vice versa. Whatever I do, wearing a kippah, will, I feel, be transferred onto Jews.
Yesterday, for example, I declined to tip at the movie theater concession stand for the Diet Coke I bought.3 I don’t know what the guy behind the counter would have thought had I been wearing my kippah, but I know what I would have thought. I would have thought, “He’s thinking Jews are too cheap to tip.”
And sometimes, to be honest, I just want to be part of the in-crowd. A few days ago, I went into a guitar store to ask if they had an opinion about whether my brand-new tenor guitar4 needed any adjustments. I wore a fedora-style straw brim rather than a kippah because I wanted to be like the cool guys, not some “other.”
Yes, I’m sixty years old and still want to be cool. Go figure. One of these days, it may actually happen.5
Am I proud of this? No, I am not.
I really have no idea what people are thinking when they see me in my kippah. Maybe they are making judgments. Maybe they aren’t.
You may have heard about the famous scar experiment. A couple of researchers told experiment volunteers they were going to be given fake face-disfiguring scars and then sent out into the public to see how they were treated, to determine whether there’d be bias against them. The volunteers underwent a makeup procedure and were given mirrors to see their disfigured appearance. But before they left the lab, they were told the scars needed a touch-up, and the fake scars were removed. The subjects then went about their daily business imagining they had a repulsive scar when they did not, and, what do you think? They reported all sorts of negative reactions and biases provoked by the non-existing scar on their face. They’d been made paranoid, essentially, by the simple idea that they had a scar.
It’s a powerful illustration of how self-consciousness sabotages social interactions, of how we internalize and project fears of being othered. And yet, no amount of self-awareness can relieve the feeling I sometimes have that I’ve got a big scar, a big mark of Cain sitting on my head, when I’m wearing my kippah in public.
Once, I was shamed into publicly wearing my kippah.
Last year, my family and I saw a play called Prayer for the French Republic. The play is about a Paris kid in a secular Jewish family who’s become religious and gets attacked in the street for wearing his kippah. His father tries to talk him into being more reasonable. “Why don’t you wear a baseball cap instead of a kippah?” he asks.
I forget the kid’s response, but I remember my embarrassment. I was in the audience wearing a baseball cap instead of a kippah.
At intermission, I switched it out for my yarmulke and felt a little more in integrity, if also more self-conscious.
Of course, another issue with wearing a kippah in public is that you have to live up to it. Once I put on that kippah at the play, for example, I wasn’t going to buy anything from the concession stand that didn’t have a proper hechsher (kosher certification).
Indeed, whenever I wear my kippah, I feel obligated to act more properly, whether that means “guarding my eyes” or simply being more polite. If my look lingers too long on the pretty girl passing me in the vegetable aisle, what will that say about Jewish men?
When you’re wearing a kippah, as opposed to a bandanna, you, like Hebrew National, answer to a higher authority.
But what about the danger of wearing a kippah, especially in today’s climate of increased antisemitism?
We’ve all heard stories about people getting harassed in Europe, not to mention Columbia University, for wearing kippot.6 Long before October 7, a German politician warned Jews against wearing yarmulkes in public. 7
Indeed, almost every day, I drive by the following sign in my neighborhood:
This sign used to irritate me. I thought it was a terrible message, especially placed as it was in a religious neighborhood where plenty of Jewish men and boys walk around in kippot. Moreover, it bugged me that the sign was sponsored by a Jewish organization that made light of religious Judaism and whose members doubtlessly had little desire to wear a kippah in public.8
But then one day, our Orthodox, Chassidic rabbi mentioned the billboard and admitted that even he sometimes felt self-conscious wearing a kippah at the mall in the days following October 7, and I cooled off a bit on my resentment toward Jewbelong.
So, what’s been my actual experience wearing a kippah in public as opposed to the ersatz scarface paranoia?
I’m going to have to say 99.9% positive. Once, a student referred to me as “that guy in the beanie,” but that’s about the worst of it.9
In the first days after October 7, a woman approached me at Cosco as I was checking out. She saw my kippah and wanted to tell me how she was thinking of Israel and praying for us. When I was living in Chattanooga, where there was scarcely a kippah to be found outside the synagogue, anytime I’d wear mine out, I’d get only positive remarks, usually from people who had been to Israel and wanted to tell me what a great place it was.
But by far, my favorite story about wearing my kippah came late one night in a Walmart parking lot.
That particular parking lot in Chattanooga was known to be dangerous at night. People had been robbed there. I was leaving my car around 11 pm in the largely deserted lot when a large, shabbily dressed man approached me. I thought, at the very least, he was going to ask me for money and, at the worst, that I was about to get mugged.
“I see you’re a religious man,” he said as he drew up on me.
“I just got out of jail,” he said.
And then he got real close and put his arms around me.
“Religion,” he said, “was the only thing that got me through.”
I returned the hug. He released me, and we both went our ways.
More recently, I wore my kippah to a comedy club in New York. At the time, I also had a pretty long beard. At one point, a Jewish comedian came out, and he had this whole schtick where, instead of getting on stage, he walked around the audience and made shocking and hilarious statements about us. And, of course, he spotted me.
“Rabbi!” he shouted with glee and then went on to ask me a question about a certain sexual practice that, in truth, is well in line with Torah values but was not the sort of thing one wants to discuss in a room full of strangers with your wife and son sitting on either side of you.
That comedian had a lot of fun with me and my kippah, which was fine. He had me in hysterics and afterward even got the audience to express its solidarity with the plight of Jews.
There was a lot of discussion later about whether it was okay for me to be wearing my kippah in such a “treifish,” i.e., unholy, environment. But, recently, when I asked my rabbi about it, he argued that, while there may have been a question as to whether I ought to have been at the comedy club in the first place, there was certainly no question that once I was there, it would have been improper not to wear the kippah, to say, well, I’m going to disregard God in this place.
So, there you have it. There’s no good excuse for me not wearing my kippah. When I’ve done so, I’ve almost always drawn positive attention. It encourages me to be a better man. It attests to the presence of God even in places you might not expect to find him. There’s no reason I shouldn’t wear it all the time. Maybe someday I will.
In the meantime, for those who do, I salute you.
I’ve been searching for the link but haven’t found it.
I did stop wearing my bandanna in Israel, however, after a parking lot attendent mistook me for a woman. Guys in Israel just don’t wear tichels.
I mean, really, why do I need nowadays to pay a 15% to 20% surchase on every interaction I have with another human being? Waiters, okay, but not every other individual in the world who stands behind a counter. Geez, talk about inflation.
Basically, a baritone ukulele with big dreams.
And kippahs, reminiscent of the old-style freshman beany Fred is forced to wear in the episode, “Flintstone of Prinstone,” are simply not cool.
“Kippot” is plural for kippah.
The irony being that the people harassing observant Jews were largely Muslim immigrants whom Germany had let enter the country in large waves out of guilt for its treatment of Jews in the Holocaust.
At least the male ones. I imagine JewBelong fully endorses women wearing kippot as a self-consciously transgressive act about which all I can say is, why anyone would unnecessarily subject themselves to this unattractive little garment is beyond me.
I experimented with wearing my kippah to work off and on for years before finally settling down to making it a regular thing. The first time I tried teaching that way, I couldn’t focus on anything other than the thought that the students must think it’s really weird I’m wearing such a thing. After that, I taught in hats for a decade or so, and I imagine the students thought it was because I was self-conscious about my baldness. But during Covid, after I moved to a community full of Orthodox Jews, I got used to wearing my kippah most of the time and began wearing it on Zoom classes. Somehow, that broke the spell, and I’ve been wearing it while teaching face-to-face ever since. And what can I say? The first year I wore my kippah in the classroom, I got my one and only nomination for a best-teacher award. Coincidence?
I, an intentional liberal Jewish woman, put on a kippah at the end of 2016 as a act of defiance and to out myself. It has never come off. I wore it while running for city council, then serving on council. I wore it in right-wing spaces and left-wing spaces. I wore it walking through Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
I'm old and, as the saying goes, have no f--s left to give. People want to come at me? Whatever. It's still an act of defiance and pride.
Very impressed with your honesty.