Political stories are often told in terms of binaries and lines. Here’s the right, there’s the left, and these are the lines that divide them.
But then there are political stories that are more like spinning vortices of multiple causes and conditions, defying easy categorization.
The debate over “mask bans”—laws that would criminalize the wearing of face coverings in the name of protecting the citizenry from harassment and violence—is one of those stories. On the surface, the issue is clear: in the wake of anti-Zionist protesters wearing masks to conceal their identities, local governments have proposed (and in the case of Nassau County, New York, passed) bans on wearing masks in public, while others have revived 1950s-era laws passed to fight the Ku Klux Klan. Civil liberties and free political expression on one side, concerns about safety and antisemitism on the other.
But that is too simple. Masks have been religious symbols for millennia, concealing as well as revealing our identities, at once threatening and erotic, compliant and defiant. Really, this is a story of shifting symbols that mean different things at different times to different people, and of legislation based more on fear than reality.
While the earliest known masks date back nine thousand years, this story begins in 2020, when Americans dutifully masked up to prevent the spread of a deadly, contagious, and impossible-to-detect disease. At least, most of us did. To the shock of my coastal-elite, liberal bubble, mask-wearing quickly became politicized—that is, became a symbol. MAGA populists, enraged at the incursion on their freedom to catch and spread Covid-19, decried mask mandates as unconstitutional and immoral, even holding mask burnings that resembled pathetic reenactments of the Säuberung, or more recent demonstrations by the Klan. Some denied the science of airborne illness, or the distinction between private choice and public endangerment. Others simply called masks “face diapers.” Trump himself was not seen wearing a mask until July 2020, an astonishing and harmful delay.
In response to the right’s desecration of the mask, the left sacralized it, turning it into a symbol and signal of virtue. This all made sense: progressives are at once communitarian and, in their own way, purity-obsessed. While the right patrols the boundaries of sexual purity, the left frets over hygiene and harm: organic produce, cruelty-free cleaning products, and pure spaces free from offensive speech. The mask was the perfect totem of liberal virtue. Indeed, we even found ways to out-purify one another, first with N-95s, then KN-95s, then KN-95s under a cloth mask just in case. Of course we did.
The symbol endured even after the facts changed. In 2021, most people in my liberal neighborhood of Park Slope, Brooklyn, still wore masks outside, even though doing so was by then known to be medically meaningless. By 2022, mask-wearing had become a symbol of anti-ableism, or perhaps of anxious hyper-vigilance, and even today, masking is still required at progressively-minded cultural events (KN-95 only, of course). For Christian Nationalists—“Moms for Liberty” was born during the pandemic, in outrage over school closures and mask requirements—the mask is a symbol of government overreach, and wearing one expresses slavish obedience to statist, often sinister, control. For progressives, masks are symbols of care, inclusion, and orthodox political affiliation, which offers its own kind of safety.
In October 2023, even before the brutal Israeli assault in Gaza began, anti-Israel protests appeared in major cities and on college campuses. This, as I and many other American Jews noted at the time, seemed painfully cruel. Many of us were still reeling from the largest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, and already the protests against Israel were underway—including many which justified the murders. Apparently, eight-year-old girls can be genocidal colonizers, too.
Outraged, the right struck back, not by calling for dialogue and calm, but by doxxing and harassing college students, withdrawing job offers and threatening reprisals. This was a technique they’d used before: in the late 2010s, also against pro-Palestine activists, and then again in 2021, during the half-cocked “Twitter Files” crusade led by Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, Jim Jordan, and other reactionaries, when students connected, however tangentially, to the so-called “censorship industrial complex” found themselves doxxed, harassed online (especially if they were women), and threatened IRL as well.
Now, with more money, more trauma, and new facial-recognition software that could identify students in a crowd photo, pro-Israel actors like Accuracy in Media and Canary Mission went into overdrive—including literally, in the form of a “Doxxing Truck” sharing photos and identifying information of offending students. As with the Twitter Files, the doxxed students weren’t necessarily activists. As The Harvard Crimson reported, “at least four online sites had listed the personal information of students linked to clubs that had signed onto the [October 8 anti-Israel] statement, including full names, class years, past employment, social media profiles, photos, and hometowns.”
In other words, all you had to do was join a club whose leadership decided to sign that misbegotten statement, and you’d become a target for blacklisting and harassment. It was a disgusting, repellant, reprehensible move, one bankrolled by secretive right-wing billionaires donating through shell nonprofit organizations and promoted by politicians who had been attacking higher education long before October 7.
And so, tit for tat, student activists struck back … by masking up. Some wore keffiyehs—though, in the woke 2020s, that can smack of cultural appropriation, so others reached for their trusty old KN-95s, while still others improvised. Right-wing trolls could still scour the internet for identifying information, but at least AI-aided facial identification tools (quite odious in their own right) wouldn’t pick them out of the crowd. Take that, Bill Ackman.
Masks are quite often threatening. Think of Jason in the Friday the 13th series, or movie villains in ski masks, or, for that matter, intentionally terrifying masks used in indigenous rituals around the world. Perhaps this is evolutionary in nature; human beings read one another’s faces for evidence of good or ill intent, and when we can’t do that, we are scared on some primal, sapiens level. Eroticized masks—masquerade parties, rock stars in sunglasses—also play with this sense of danger. Who knows what’s beneath those shades?
Turns out, however, that American Jews in particular can get quite triggered seeing keffiyeh-wearing activists shout at them on the street.
I don’t know whether the intimidation is intentional or not. Maybe the masked protesters, shouters, rioters, occupiers, vandals, cancelers, excluders, and harassers know they’re terrifying their “Zionist” targets. Or maybe they’re trying to keep themselves safe from zealots, shouters, cancelers, blacklisters, doxxers, and harassers on the other side. Maybe some of each.
But speaking as a rabbi (and as someone routinely described as a kapo by the right and a genocide apologist by the left), I can vouch that the image of the masked protestor is an image I was raised to fear, even if the message being shouted is anti-Zionist rather than antisemitic. I associate the mask with terrorists and rock-throwers, not mere political adversaries. Of course, this is my subjective experience, based on the specific cultural context of my childhood. But it is definitely my experience.
While the right patrols the boundaries of sexual purity, the left frets over hygiene and harm: organic produce, cruelty-free cleaning products, and pure spaces free from offensive speech.
And if the last year of political “discourse” has taught us anything, it’s that conservatives love manipulating the fears of American Jews. They inflame them in congressional hearings and on right-wing media outlets, they exploit them to win elections or score political points, and they pander to them—including by proposing laws that criminalize the wearing of masks in public places.
In the context of recent history, this is quite remarkable. In 2021, conservative and “independent” pundits insisted that not wearing a mask was a civil right. But in 2024, they insist that wearing a mask is not one.
The journalist Jonathan Chait put it well: “Conservative authoritarianism is largely an exercise in projecting their own illiberalism onto their opponents and then acting in ‘retaliation’ to these imagined crimes.” I would only add that conservative snowflaking is a kind of mirroring as well. One year ago, the right was castigating college students for being delicate flowers hiding in their safe spaces else they be triggered by some offense. Now, mask bans seek to make entire cities into safe spaces so that Jews are not triggered by a scarf.
The triggering is real; many Jews are afraid. But like my own reactions, much of that fear is based not on a present-moment threat, but on decades of conditioning and centuries of history.
Whether anti-masking laws are constitutional or not is an open question. As they are challenged (the ACLU has already filed lawsuits), courts will have to balance the rights to free expression and free exercise of religion against the compelling state interest of preserving public safety—or at least, a democratically-elected government’s perception of public safety, to which courts ordinarily defer.
There is precedent for the proposed new wave of laws: the anti-Klan laws of the 1950s. Then, as now, an unpopular political group used face coverings to conceal their identities. And then, as now, states and municipalities responded by banning such coverings. West Virginia’s anti-Klan law, for example, bars “any person over 16 years of age to, with the intent to conceal his identity, wear any mask, hood or other device whereby a substantial portion of the face is hidden or covered so as to conceal the identity of the wearer.”
These laws aren’t just precedents—most of them are still on the books. And they are occasionally enforced. In 2004, the NYPD denied a rally by a KKK-affiliated group on the basis of New York’s anti-mask law, and in 2011 they arrested some Occupy Wall Street protesters for violating it. These actions were upheld in court, suggesting that anti-mask laws, old and new, are likely constitutional, even absent an explicit threat to public safety.
It would be interesting to ask today’s masked protesters if their free-speech claims also would apply to the Klan.
Meanwhile, the first arrest made under Nassau County’s new mask law—in suburban Hicksville, NY—was exactly what civil libertarians feared: a would-be robber with no political agenda whatsoever was arrested for wearing a ski mask while he cased a residential neighborhood. This was obviously not what the law was supposed to be about, but Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman nonetheless bragged in a statement that “police officers were able to use the mask ban legislation as well as other factors to stop and interrogate an individual who was carrying a weapon with the intent to engage in a robbery. Passing this law gave police another tool to stop this dangerous criminal.”
The ACLU couldn’t have said it better.
Do I support or oppose these bills?
Practically speaking, mask bills are either overbroad or unenforceable. There are many legitimate reasons to wear a mask in public. Covid-19 is still with us, and does pose significant threats to the elderly, infirm, and immunocompromised; for these populations, masking up is legitimate self-protection. Likewise, it’s hard to see the present Supreme Court not demanding a religious exemption for those who cover their faces for religious reasons, including traditional Muslims.
Yet if health and religious exemptions are provided, how can the law be enforced? Are police officers supposed to ask for doctor’s notes establishing someone’s need for PPE? And what sort of need, anyway? Remember, the more left-wing one is, the more likely one is to mask up already, whether out of fear of illness or fear of appearing ableist. How is a cop supposed to adjudicate that? Are KN-95s allowed, but keffiyehs not? In which case, what about Muslim women who cover their faces, and what about other religious conservatives? No exceptions make mask bans too strict, but any exceptions make them too lenient.
As a matter of policy, it is certain that some “activists” cross the line into antisemitism, animus, and intimidation, and hide behind masks both to conceal and to intimidate. Really, it is unfortunate that the latest Palestine solidarity movement has come into fruition at a time of such abject meanness and stupidity; its tactics, drenched in strategic vacuity and righteous absolutism (“Zionism” is genocide, no disagreement is acceptable, no dialogue is acceptable, even AOC is treyf), are certainly not helping anyone in Gaza. And while there is a profound justice in opposing Israel’s nationalist government and brutal war—something around half of Israelis are doing in their streets—that cause is ill-served by a movement congenitally unable to condemn bigotry within its own ranks, and committed to a maximalist agenda that, if ever implemented, would require ethnic cleansing of its own.
But empowering vigilantes to doxx, harass, and retaliate against speech they deem to be offensive is also odious; if masks are to be banned, such actions should be as well. Meanwhile, overly broad mask bans restrict legitimate activities—political expression, health protection, religious practice—merely on the basis of fears that some people (like me) might experience. This is not the way to keep anyone safe.
In my rabbinic role, I am sensitive to the feelings of threat and anxiety now prevalent in the Jewish community. But the right way to respond to those feelings is to combat antisemitism in public, while addressing the deep psychological roots of our fears in spiritual, religious, and other personal contexts. Not, as demagogues have done since time immemorial, to pass laws based on them.