[This essay first appeared on Lawson’s Substack blog, My Musings, Dec. 31, 2025]
Following, Oct. 7, 2023, I have seen a wave of social-media posts, most of them on Facebook, in which Jewish leaders who are not Black, many of whom are rabbis, compare the keffiyeh to a Ku Klux Klan hood.
I want to be clear about my own location and context. I live in the United States. I do not live in Israel, and I have not experienced life in Israel after Oct. 7, 2023. At the same time, I understand that these comparisons did not emerge in a vacuum. They surfaced in the aftermath of real violence, profound grief, fear and a deep sense of vulnerability. Oct. 7 shattered many people’s assumptions about Jewish safety and security. That fear is real, and it deserves to be acknowledged.
But fear does not give us permission to be careless with other people’s suffering.
The Depth of Jewish Fear
I understand what many of my colleagues are trying to do. They are reaching for an analogy as a way to generate empathy, especially from people who may not understand the depth of Jewish fear or vulnerability in this moment.
But it is always better to reach for analogies rooted in histories you have lived, carried and understood. Without that cultural competency, analogy stops being explanatory and becomes extractive.
When we appropriate anti-Black suffering as a rhetorical weapon, we signal that Black trauma is a tool for our use rather than a history we respect.
What I have witnessed instead is a rush toward the most extreme imagery in American history, deployed to shock rather than clarify. The analogy does the work of moral condemnation without requiring careful thought about history, power or context.
It matters who is making this comparison.
When Jews who are not Black invoke the KKK, its hoods, lynchings and campaigns of racial terror, as a rhetorical device, they are borrowing a form of violence in which they have not lived. They are reaching for the language of anti-Black terror without fully grappling with what made that terror possible, sustained it and normalized it in America.
This is a bad analogy.
Using Black Terror as a Metaphor
Many people agreed the analogy was offensive, then immediately pivoted to explaining Jewish fear to me, as if that erased the harm. It doesn’t. Naming racism and cultural incompetence is not the same thing as denying fear.
This dynamic reveals how easily Black suffering becomes available as a metaphor. How quickly the most extreme forms of anti-Black violence are treated as interchangeable symbols rather than as specific historical realities. And how readily they are invoked without responsibility for their meaning.
Jewish fear is real, and it deserves to be acknowledged. But fear does not give us permission to be careless with other people’s suffering.
Once we start equating cultural symbols with instruments of racial terror, we are no longer talking about safety. We are talking about projection. And projection is not the same as truth.
There is also racism embedded in the comparison itself because it relies on racialized assumptions about danger, threat and who is presumed guilty simply by association or appearance.
To equate a keffiyeh with a KKK hood is to collapse Palestinian identity into criminality and inherent violence. It treats a visible marker of a people as evidence of threat, rather than as culture, history or humanity. That move mirrors a familiar racial logic in America: that certain bodies, clothes or symbols are dangerous simply by existing.
I do not need Jewish fear explained to me. I am not confused about antisemitism. I am naming a specific harm and insisting that it matters.
Power Matters
And no matter how fearful someone feels when they see someone wearing a keffiyeh, nothing about the keffiyeh matches the racial terror of the KKK hood.
The KKK was not a fringe group; it was deeply embedded in American political life. Governors, members of Congress and Supreme Court justices were members or benefited from its support. The hood functioned within a system of state power, signaling that violence, lynching and murder could happen at any time with impunity, maintaining white dominance through terror against a minority population.
That history matters. Power matters.
There is no comparable political or state-sponsored power structure behind the keffiyeh. There is no American institution that has used the keffiyeh to enforce domination, carry out terror campaigns, or maintain legal and social control over Jews. The comparison collapses under even minimal scrutiny, once power is taken seriously.
