When a Yarmulke Stands for All Jews: Navigating Shifting Signs from Synagogue to School in Luxembourg

In the lives of students in Luxembourg’s Liberal Jewish complementary school,
flexibility and mobility are highly valued as key characteristics of modern living. Complementary school students feel they easily meet these criteria—they are multilingual, cosmopolitan, and their approach to Jewish life is flexible, and equally
importantly, they look, dress, and comport themselves “like everyone else.” These
factors are understood to facilitate multiple movements and belongings in the contemporary world. The students directly contrast their ways of being with those of
more observant Jews whom they refer to as “religious”; the material, embodied,
and visible nature of observant Jewish life is perceived to be an impediment to participation and success in the secular sphere. However, when Jewishness appears in these students’ secular school classrooms, it is most often represented by Orthodox presenting men—often a man in a yarmulke. Further, these men and their yarmulkes are taken to represent all Jews, framed as a homogeneous group of religious adherents. For many complementary school students, these experiences can be jarring—they suddenly find themselves on the “wrong” side of the religious–secular
divide and grouped together with those from whom they could not feel more distant.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and a material approach to religion, this article
argues that the yarmulke comes to point to different levels and modes of observance
and identities and enable different possible belongings in the secular public sphere
as it travels across contexts that include different definitions of and attitudes toward
religion and Jewishness.