Skullcap, Kippah, or Yarmulke?

“A campaign was launched in France calling on all citizens to don the Jewish skullcap on Friday [January 16],” reported that day’s Algemeiner, “after the Marseille chief rabbi urged fellow residents to avoid wearing kippot, out of fear of anti-Semitic terror. . . . The campaign called on citizens to put on the yarmulke at 10 a.m. on Friday in a coordinated effort.”

Skullcap, kippah (or kipah), yarmulke: three different words, all in one short paragraph, for the same round Jewish head covering. Are they interchangeable?

Not quite. To begin with, kippah alone is italicized, since it does not appear as a recognized word in English dictionaries. More importantly, although all kippot and yarmulkes are skullcaps, and every yarmulke is a kippah, not every kippah is a yarmulke. This is because the Hebrew word kippah, as it is used in Israel and increasingly in the Diaspora, denotes any skullcap worn by a Jew for religious reasons, whereas “yarmulke,” which comes from Yiddish, generally refers only to the sewn satin or felt cap, commonly with a cotton lining, of Ashkenazi Eastern Europe. Although it needn’t necessarily be black any more, as all yarmulkes once were and most still are, it cannot be knit, crocheted, or embroidered like many kippot. If it were, it, too, in the contemporary language of most American Jews, would be no longer a yarmulke but a kippah.