Growing up, we had a rule of thumb about yarmulkes: The closer yours was to your forehead, the more strictly religious you were. The frum bochurim placed theirs practically on their noses; the boys from Conservative families bobby-pinned their kippahs on the back of their heads. The cool kids, of course, stuffed theirs in their pockets.

The Jewish skullcap, in other words, was a signifier of much more than the religious precept it embodied. Over the years, not only a yarmulke’s positioning but also its style, size and material have come to place its wearer somewhere on a continuum of Jewish identity. Trends in yarmulke wearing, then, may tell us a story about where Judaism is — forgive me — headed.

So what kind of Jew wears an $85 yarmulke, and what kind of Judaism demands it? These questions gnawed at me when I first learned about Rubenstein Paris, a new kippah couturier whose ads found me on Instagram. Available in a range of expensive-looking solid colors (copper, cream, sapphire) and fabrics (velvet, corduroy, even horsehair), “…these kippahs are here to replace your tattered souvenirs,” the ads said. “Everybody’s just walking around with their kippot from — I don’t know, Mendel and Rachel’s wedding, 2019,” Jonathan Hirsch, Rubenstein’s German-Israeli founder, told me recently. “It’s such a sacred item. Why aren’t there beautiful yarmulkas?

He’s onto something, I thought. Even as an image-conscious, Shabbat-observant millennial, I had largely neglected the yarmulke; when I wanted to look sharp, I ditched it. But when I had to clip up, I made do with whatever I had lying around. Hirsch offered to send a freebie, but at $85, accepting it felt compromising. The loaner we agreed to instead came in a branded drawstring bag, which was accompanied by a sleek black storage box. Although I’d secretly hoped for the horsehair model, the kippah Hirsch sent was more utilitarian: Ribbed velvet, golden brown, with the rise and structural integrity of one of those dome-houses you see in Architectural Digest. Velvet piping twisted around its circumference; its cloth inner lining depicted a globe and a shofar. I put it on.

The story of the kippah begins in the Talmud, when 3rd-century sage Rav Huna proclaimed that he never walked more than four cubits without his head covered to symbolize that the divine presence was always above him. After rabbinic law codified the practice in the 1500s, the kippah evolved into a marker of Jewish cultural mores. For example, 20 years ago, most Modern Orthodox boys wore black suede kippahs, but today, suede is disappearing, replaced by black velvet.

But it’s a fraught moment to be displaying any marker of Jewish identity. Wearing a kippah in public makes you subject to a certain type of attention these days: The glare of being Jewish at a time when antisemitism is on the rise. Hirsch, who is 29 and lives in Berlin, knows this firsthand — these days he doesn’t feel safe wearing a kippah in public. And yet there is a Renaissance in Judaica today driven by new designers and younger consumers finding joy in their heritage. First, ironically, then with some resignation, I found that the Rubenstein was the only kippah I wanted to wear — my fancy kippah became my everyday kippah. Putting it on was a daily treat — I was humored by the upgrade. I began picturing how gloomy and shallow life would be without it. I debated the unthinkable — ponying up to keep the loaner.

I was still conflicted about the idea of this object with sticker-shock. I put the question to Hirsch. There are very few ritual objects, he pointed out, from the kiddush cup to candlesticks to one’s tallit, that we pride ourselves on buying cheap. Why should kippot be the exception?

Hirsch was right, and I expected others to acknowledge my commitment and my sophistication. Only one person complimented me on it — my mother. Everyone else, I’m certain, was stealing covetous glances at my designer yarmulka. But I’m going to return it soon. The premium fabrics, the shofar in the lining, and the devotion it all symbolized were between me and Ha Shem.

By Lewis Keene

New York City’s annual Israel Day Parade marched up Fifth Avenue on Sunday, May 31, with tens of thousands of people turning out for what organizers called one of the  largest parades in the event’s history, a public show of Jewish solidarity when anti-semitism is rising around the world. Gov. Kathy Hochul, Sen. Chuck Schumer, Attorney General Letitia James, former mayors Eric Adams and Michael Bloomberg, and a long list of officials marched to underscore support for Israel.

Getty Images/Spencer Platt

The painting shows a girl in a bonnet and her younger brother staring across the Normandy coast toward an unknown horizon. The artwork was acquired in Paris for Adolf Hitler, one of countless works swept up in the Nazi plunder. In May, the piece went on permanent display in a new room at the city’s Musée d’Orsay as part of France’s reckoning with Nazi-era looting. The gallery is given over to the orphaned masterpieces of the Nazi era — more than 2,000 works stolen and never claimed. The state holds them in trust for heirs who may yet come forward. The museum holds 13 of such works, including that pictured by Belgian artist Alfred Stevens.

Included in the display are works by Degas, Renoir, Cézanne and Rodin, appropriated from Jewish collectors and intended for the private collections of Hitler and his officers, also a museum of art that was never built. The works were discovered by an allied group known as the Monuments Men, whose sole duty was to recover stolen art.

According to Francois Blanchetiére, the Orsay’s co-curator of the gallery, “The consequences of the Holocaust must be repaired. There is no statute of limitations on these crimes.”

On an unseasonably warm Friday evening, 40 people gathered for a Kabbalat Shabbat service in a grove of redwoods and California live oaks. A group of musicians led the congregation in singing Hebrew tunes as an owl made his presence known from above. The service was part of Makom Shalom, a forest shul that launched during the High Holidays last year and has grown to 83 adult members. Rabbi Zelig Golden leads the nondenominational congregation in rural West Sonoma County — an earth-based Judaism, where congregants are finding a spiritual home outside a traditional synagogue with environmental ideals at the core. “The Jewish soul comes alive in the natural world,” Rabbi Golden said.

Gaia Esensten photo

Jeffrey Salkin/For ‘Religion News Service’

One of my adult students recently asked me, “You know how God spoke to Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebecca, Jacob, Moses, Isaiah, and the rest of the prophets? Why doesn’t God speak anymore?”

It is a truly good question. A quick answer: After Malachi, there was no more prophecy, and God stopped speaking. But the Talmud has a different answer: Even though Prophecy had ended by that time, the voice of God could sometimes speak to people in a bat kol, or a soft, quiet tone. God could speak to us in the voice of a young girl.

Which brings me to a great Jewish theologian. Some years ago in Hollywood, Florida, I was close to the family of 13-year-old Rebecca Adler. She became bat mitzvah under my tutelage, but for one exquisite moment, she became my teacher.

One day in our 7th-grade class, the kids were wondering aloud: “What would it be like if God could speak to us? Would it be all thunder and lightning, or even something more intense?”

In the midst of this conversation, Rebecca piped up and said, “Whenever we do a mitzvah, it is as if God is speaking to us.” Her words echoed one of the most important Jewish thinkers of modern times. The great theologian and social activist Abraham Joshua Heschel once said, “When we fulfill a mitzvah, God is revealed in our deeds; in the depths of our being, we perceive the Divine Voice.”

I first heard that teaching from a 13-year-old student, whose depth of faith could give shape to our own spiritual lives.

Jewish Cemetery Preserved by Christians and Jews

Newport, Rhode Island, had once been home to a thriving  Colonial Jewish community — also the home of Touro Synagogue, the nation’s oldest surviving Jewish house of worship. But after the Revolutionary War and the city’s economic decline, that community largely faded. Yet the cemetery and the synagogue building remained.

            The Jewish burial ground dated to 1677. In 1822, Abraham Touro left money for the upkeep of the cemetery, the synagogue (built in 1763), and the street on which they stood. Newport’s Town Council was authorized to use the interest for repairs.

            When Henry Wadsworth Longfellow visited Newport’s Jewish cemetery in 1854, he wrote of the graves as “silent beside the never-silent waves.” He noticed, too, what endured there: “Gone are the living, but the dead remain,” he observed, “and they are not neglected.”

            Newport’s preservation of Jewish sacred space was shared. Jews endowed these places and returned to bury their dead there. Christian officials repaired, protected, and publicly honored them. In this way, a Jewish inheritance was carried forward until communal life returned.

            In 1883, Touro Synagogue was rededicated, and a new Jewish community was established in Newport. Yet, even in the years when the congregation was gone, the dead were not abandoned.

                                                                                                               —Austin Albanese/The Forward