(JTA) — The new banners hanging outside a public building in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, channeled the college town’s history of progressive activism.
One depicted a member of the Chapel Hill Nine, Black activists whose 1960 sit-in at a local lunch counter kicked off protests in favor of racial integration. Another showed a raised fist. A third portrayed a college graduate, clad in the trademark blue of the University of North Carolina, under the words “Good Trouble” — a reference to the famous call to action against injustice from the civil rights hero John Lewis.
For some locals, though, the most eye-catching element of the display, installed in November 2024 at Chapel Hill’s Peace and Justice Plaza, was a patch of black-and-white squares drawn over the graduation gown. They recognized it immediately as a keffiyeh, a traditional Palestinian headscarf that has been adopted by protesters on the left, and they saw it as a threat.
“This banner, supporting the student protests, is essentially equating Good Trouble with support for Hamas terrorists going on a murderous rampage, torturing, gang raping, and murdering men, women, and children in their homes in grisly fashion,” Kathy Kaufman, a member of a local Reconstructionist synagogue, wrote to the city.
To Kaufman, who chairs Kehillah Synagogue’s social action committee, and to others in town, the presence of the keffiyeh together with the UNC colors sent a clear message. The banner, and by extent the city, seemed to be endorsing the pro-Palestinian student protesters from the past year. According to Kaufman, some of those “vociferous” protesters began lobbying against Israel in the days after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel; some, she says, openly supported Hamas.
(A Chapel Hill native, Keith Siegel, was taken hostage on Oct. 7 and released by Hamas on Feb. 1.)
Kaufman and others in town mounted a letter-writing and advocacy campaign with a single goal.
“What we’re asking is that the banner be taken down,” Kaufman says. “It’s insulting to us.”
Chapel Hill acceded to their requests, taking all three banners down. “While I strongly feel that public art should be thought-provoking, I don’t believe it should cause harm,” Chris Blue, the town manager, said in a statement. “And right now, this piece is causing harm.”
The banner brouhaha in Chapel Hill adds to a growing number of instances where the presence of keffiyehs has elicited a sharp reaction from Jews who see them on TV, in grocery stores, and on the streets. The keffiyeh’s increasing ubiquitousness has turned up the heat on a simmering cultural debate: More than a year after Oct. 7, should Jews feel threatened by the sight of a person wearing one?
For the Anti-Defamation League — which monitors antisemitism and anti-Israel activity and maintains that opposition to Israel’s existence is antisemitic — the answer is: not necessarily. “Keffiyehs are not a hate symbol and the presence of keffiyehs has no bearing on whether something is classified as an antisemitic incident,” the group said in a statement.
But many Jews say they experience the garment as an unmistakable sign of the wearer’s antipathy toward Israel and anyone who supports it — attitudes that have accompanied a spike in antisemitic incidents since the start of the Israel-Hamas war.
“It creates this sense of wariness, and for some people, the sense that they are in danger,” says Manya Marcus, a Jewish psychotherapist in Chicago and host of the podcast What Came After, about the aftermath of Oct. 7.
The clothing item itself has a long history among both Jews and Arabs, with origins in biblical times. Zionist settlers before 1948, including Chaim Weizmann, wore the keffiyeh to blend in with their new Arab neighbors, according to the National Library of Israel. The keffiyeh became explicitly associated with pro-Palestinian movements when Yasser Arafat, head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, began consistently donning it in public in the 1960s and 1970s. Yet for decades following, according to Israeli fashion historian Einav Rabinovitch-Fox, many Jewish Israelis continued to wear them.
Before Oct. 7, the sight of non-Muslims wearing the keffiyeh was decried more often than it was celebrated. In 2021, CAIR lambasted the fashion designer Louis Vuitton for selling a scarf that resembled, and was named after, a keffiyeh, accusing the company of appropriation. Before then, in 2008, Dunkin’ Donuts pulled an ad campaign that featured celebrity chef Rachel Ray after conservative pundits complained that Ray appeared to be wearing a keffiyeh.
Everything changed after Oct. 7, as pro-Palestinian protests swept the globe. Many Muslim groups now encourage allies to don the keffiyeh, and an untold number of people have done so, buying keffiyehs from Amazon and elsewhere to wear to protests and in their daily life.
“If you’d asked me two years ago, I wouldn’t have such a negative reaction,” says Kaufman in Chapel Hill. “I associate it with the Palestinian movement, but I wouldn’t have reacted, necessarily, the way I did.”
Since Oct. 7, some conservative commentators have compared progressive members of Congress to Nazis for wearing keffiyehs; three staffers at New York’s Noguchi Museum say they were fired in September for wearing keffiyehs to work; and a singer in Toronto received backlash for performing The Star-Spangled Banner at a National Hockey League game while wearing a sweater that resembled a keffiyeh. (A couple months earlier the singer, Kiana Ledé, had reportedly disinvited “Zionist” fans from her concerts.)
In Georgia, a public school equity coordinator who had previously faced an investigation over his commentary on the Israel-Hamas war invited further scrutiny when he wore a keffiyeh on the one-year anniversary of the attacks.
Marcus summarizes how Jews in her circle often look askance at someone wearing a keffiyeh: “Is this a fad, or are you very well aware that this is a garment that was worn by people who raped, brutalized, beheaded, butchered people like me?”
The ADL has experienced keffiyeh whiplash of its own. CEO Jonathan Greenblatt drew fire after he seemed to compare wearing a keffiyeh to wearing a swastika armband during an MSNBC appearance in April 2024.
“People who say, ‘Death to Zionists, I wish for that and worse’ — if you wouldn’t tolerate it if someone’s wearing a swastika on their arm, I’m sorry, you shouldn’t tolerate it if they’re wearing a keffiyeh,” he said on the cable news show Morning Joe.
His remarks at the time — a clip of which circulated online with the “death to Zionists” part edited out — prompted widespread anger from Muslim and Palestinian solidarity groups who accused Greenblatt of demonizing the keffiyeh. Dozens of Muslim affinity groups signed onto an open letter condemning Greenblatt’s remarks and calling for his firing.
Keffiyeh wearers, the groups insisted, were not the perpetrators of violent actions, but the victims of them.
“Hate crimes and acts of discrimination against Palestinian-Americans have risen dramatically in recent months. This includes numerous attacks sparked by the public display of the keffiyeh,” the groups, led by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, asserted. “The rhetoric that Mr. Greenblatt and other extreme supporters of the Israeli government have used to smear Palestinian human rights advocates has contributed to this ongoing surge in hate.”
“I don’t believe that the keffiyeh is a hate symbol,” Greenblatt told the Forward. “Clearly, it’s a cultural symbol with tremendous resonance for people in the Middle East. It’s not a symbol of hate.” A few months earlier, during a speech at Brown University, he had expressed empathy for a Palestinian student who had been shot in Vermont while wearing the article of clothing. (The shooting targeted three students who attended different schools, two of whom were wearing keffiyehs.)
“My Zionism compels me to mourn a Brown student shot in Burlington because he’s wearing a keffiyeh,” Greenblatt told the crowd. Protesters wearing keffiyehs staged demonstrations against his speech.
For Rabinovitch-Fox, a professor at Case Western Reserve University, the rise of the keffiyeh is testament to the ease of fast fashion protest. She recalls wearing a keffiyeh while growing up in Israel and doesn’t see it as supporting violence the way that, say, a Hamas flag at a protest would. But she also understands why American Jews would feel “triggered” by seeing keffiyehs given how widely the American left adopted it as a symbol over the last year.
“The power of fashion is that it’s really an easy way to show support or show your politics. And it doesn’t take a lot. You just wear it like it’s a scarf,” she says.
Some of the new keffiyeh-wearers include Jews seeking to challenge support for Israel in their own communities. According to a recent investigation published by the left-wing magazine In These Times, two staffers at an early education center run by Mishkan Chicago, a progressive Jewish congregation, say they were disciplined after wearing keffiyehs to work. They later resigned from their jobs.
That type of drama points to the increasingly common sight of left-wing Jewish activists adopting the garment as a show of solidarity with Palestinians.
To some Jews, the symbol can feel like more than a rhetorical threat. In August, a Jewish activist group in New York tried to pressure the city’s public school system to ban keffiyehs, arguing they “are not merely cultural garments, they have been adopted as symbols in response to the slaughter of Jews on Oct. 7.”
Debates about the keffiyehs point to larger Jewish anxiety over navigating the uneasy post-Oct. 7 world of symbols and slogans. “I don’t think a keffiyeh announces that its wearer wants Jews dead. At least the rational part of my brain doesn’t think this,” Phoebe Maltz Bovy, an editor at the Canadian Jewish News, wrote last year. “That said, am I about to make social plans with someone who isn’t even Palestinian, whose reaction to this war is to buy a scarf in support of their preferred team? I think we all know the answer.”
‘I was triggered’: Some Jews are struggling as they encounter keffiyehs in their daily lives
