This was the lede in an article published by the Associate Press early Thursday morning:
“Pro-Palestinian protesters wearing keffiyeh scarves and masks pushed their way into Barnard College’s Milbank Hall, which houses the offices of the dean, and assaulted a school employee Wednesday, according to the school.”
The article included this quote from Robin Levine, Barnard’s vice president for strategic communication: “Barnard leadership offered to meet with the protesters—just as we meet with all members of our community—on one simple condition: remove their masks. They refused.” According to the article, the school employee had to be hospitalized for his injuries.
Since the devastating Hamas terror incursion into Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the keffiyeh has become mode du jour for so-called “pro-Palestinian” protestors on myriad college campuses around the nation and in demonstrations around the world.
(I put “pro-Palestinian” in quotes because all I’ve witnessed is demonstrations rife with anti-Israel and antisemitic rhetoric. Chants like “From the river to the sea,” “We don’t want no 2-state, we want ’48!” and “There is only one solution, intifada revolution!” are in no way calls for peace. They are explicitly calls for the complete destruction of the Jewish state. These are not people who want to see a resolution to the conflict with two sovereign states living side-by-side in peace—as opposed to what I’ve long been a proponant of.)
From the perspective of a Jew with any knowledge of history, the keffiyeh has also become a symbol that adds insult to injuries we’ve suffered under the tidal wave of increased antisemitism over the last 17 months. The keffiyeh is yet another example in the long, discriminatory, and often violent history of Arab conquest over the Levant. To put it bluntly, the sudra was colonized, and they call it a keffiyeh.
Written more than a century prior to the existence of Islam, the Babylonian Talmud recounts the wearing of a traditional Jewish Sudra and the garment’s spiritual relevance dating back millennia. It’s also discussed at length in the Mishnah—the book of Jewish common law first written around 200 CE. Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews—indigenous to the Levant, Nothern Africa, Spain, and Portugal—wore it as both a headdress turban-style, and as a scarf. The designs of keffiyehs today often closely resemble the original checkered and fringed design of the Jewish Sudra as well.
After the Arab Conquest of Judea in the 7th Century CE, ensuing Islamic caliphates adopted the Sudra and then banned Jews—who lived as Dhimmis (a.k.a. second-class citizens)—from even wearing it, colonizing the scarf as they did the land. It was one of many decrees that stripped Jews of rights under Islamic rule: “One example of such a prohibition is the 1667 ʿAṭarot decree… Issued by the Qasimid State, which prohibited Jews from … wearing any sort of cloth to cover their heads. The goal of this decree was to humiliate Jews by depriving them of a respectable appearance by forcing them to use their clothes to cover their heads. The situation was remedied with the Jewish community in Yemen bribing government officials. The solution achieved through this act of corruption allowed Jews to wear cloths on their heads again, but they had to be shabby cloths.”
Covering one’s head as a means of expressing humility before God is a tradition in Jewish culture dating back to at least the first High Priest Aaron (Moses’s brother) as far back as the 13th century BCE. Head coverings have taken many forms over the millennia, from the satin or silk yarmulkes you often see us wearing here in the United States to knitted or suede kippot, colorful Bukharian kippot, Yemenite kippot, Breslov kippot, the big, fur-covered Shreimels favored by Hasidic Jews, fedoras, and many other head coverings—all of which evolved from the custom of wearing the Sudra once its use had been taken from us and also as a result of the diaspora.
In modern history, the keffiyeh’s use became popular “in the early 20th century, when Arab fellaheen (rural farmers, agricultural labourers) wore keffiyehs while working in the fields of Ottoman Palestine. No mention is made of the fact that these fields were likely cultivated by Zionist settlers—in a 1909 letter to his mother, T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) wrote that ‘Palestine was a decent country then [in Jesus’ time], and could so easily be made so again. The sooner the Jews farm it all the better: their colonies are bright spots in a desert.’”
Wearing a Sudra in the desert makes sense simply from a functional perspective; the original keffyehs were plain white to offer protection from the blazing sun. But it wasn’t until 1964 when the keffiyeh was pointedly appropriated by Yasser Arafat that it became a symbol of Palestinain nationalism. Arafat—born and raised in Egypt—adopted the look much later in life as he became a looming figure in politics. His rise to chair of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) popularized the look of his keffiyeh so much that it became almost a uniform in and of itself for the organization.
Wearing the Sudra again has been gaining popularity over the last 15–20 years as an act of decolonization—one met with great ire by many in the “pro-Palestine” camp who are either unaware of the history of the garment or are actively trying to revise history to suit their narratives.
Regardless, its popularity has been increasing among Jews as we fight to reclaim what has been taken from us.
