Kippah

Segal reasons that, as Europeans are accustomed to going bareheaded, and their priests insist on officiating with bare heads, this constitutes a uniquely non-Jewish practice.

[8] Other Halachic authorities, like the Sephardi posek Chaim Yosef David Azulai, hold that wearing a head covering is a midat hasidut—an additional measure of piety.

[8] In a recent responsum, former Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel Ovadia Yosef ruled that it should be worn to show affiliation with the religiously observant community.

"[15] This was understood by Rabbi Yosef Karo in the Shulchan Arukh as indicating that Jewish men should cover their heads and should not walk more than four cubits bareheaded.

[17] The Mishnah Berurah modifies this ruling by adding that the Achronim established a requirement to wear a head covering even when traversing fewer than four cubits,[18] and even when one is standing still, indoors, or outside.

[19] Kitzur Shulchan Aruch cites a story from the Talmud (tractate Shabbat 156b) about Rav Nachman bar Yitzchak, who might have become a thief had his mother not saved him from this fate by insisting that he cover his head, which instilled in him the fear of God.

In the 21st century, there has been an effort to suppress earlier sources that practiced this leniency, including erasing lenient responsa from newly published books.

[22] Isaac ben Moses of Vienna, in the thirteenth century, wrote that "our rabbis in France" customarily made blessings while bareheaded, but he criticized this practice.

[23] According to 20th-century rabbi Isaac Klein, a male Conservative Jew ought to cover his head when in the synagogue, at prayer or sacred study, when engaging in a ritual act, and when eating.

[44] Congress passed the Religious Apparel Amendment after a war story from the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing about the "camouflage kippah" of Jewish Navy Chaplain Arnold Resnicoff was read into the Congressional Record.

Rabbi Feller, another member of the group, continued: "We place the kippah on the very highest point of our being—on our head, the vessel of our intellect—to tell ourselves and the world that there is something which is above man's intellect: the infinite Wisdom of God.

804, 42 U. S. C. §2000cc-1(a)(1)-(2), upheld as constitutional in Cutter v. Wilkinson, 44 U.S. 709 (2005), requires by inference that Orthodox Jewish prisoners be reasonably accommodated in their request to wear kippot.

[51] The French government banned the wearing of kippot, hijabs, and large crosses in public primary and secondary schools in France in March 2004.

[56] Kippot were adopted as a symbol by some of the non-Jewish African American marchers in the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches,[57] most prominently by James Bevel.