This is an open letter undersigned by Carey Goldberg, Ronit BenShir and 19 other parents.

“We get a great many applicants and we choose the kindest ones.”

That’s our memory of the Bowdoin promotional brochure that came in the mail to our children. And over their years at the College, the environment did turn out to be mostly nurturing, supportive and caring, as did their fellow students.

But commencement in 2024 was not kind.

At least, not to family members like Raya Katz, whose grandson was graduating. Their family tree includes Holocaust survivors, residents of Israel and soldiers serving in the Israeli army. She tends to be outspoken, so her grandson made her promise not to “make a fuss” if pro-Palestine students acted out at commencement.

She kept her promise. But as one student after another came up for their diplomas wearing a keffiyeh—more than 70 in all—she cursed under her breath, the pride of the moment punctured by pain.

“Baba, how are you doing?” her grandchildren asked.

“Not good,” she answered. “Not good.”

“It made me sick,” she says—not just because the keffiyehs and signs struck her as antisemitic, but because the entire ceremony included not a single mention of the Hamas massacre of October 7 and the hostages remaining in captivity. One speaker accused Israel of “scholasticide” for bombing schools in Gaza, she says, but never mentioned that Hamas used schools to store weapons and hide fighters.

Some of us were struck by a different glaring absence; a great many graduates wore colorful scarves denoting their identity affiliations, as members of the Latin American Student Organization or the Black Student Union or other groups. But we saw not one single indication of Jewish or Israeli identity at a college where roughly one-tenth of students are Jewish.

So the question, as we dispersed from the quad, became: How does an otherwise caring, supportive campus become a place where the Jews don’t make a peep?

Something is very wrong if, in the face of a tremendously complex, two-sided conflict that has simmered and flared for decades, only one side is deemed acceptable on campus, and only one side’s pain can be acknowledged, while the other side is erased.

If the Jews of Bowdoin who support the existence of Israel, like most Jews, are largely mute, and faculty voices are overwhelmingly anti-Israel, students are not likely to understand the effect on many Jewish family members of wearing a keffiyeh to commencement.

Microaggression training teaches sensitivity to how our behavior “lands” for another person, so we are writing to tell you: for many of us, the keffiyeh means intifada and the intifada means “kill Jews.” It means terrorism like attacks on cafes and buses. The keffiyeh means the desire to erase Israel, the only Jewish state, from the map, as Hamas has vowed. And when it is worn by non-Palestinians in the wake of the October 7 massacre, to us it smacks of support for the murder, rape and abduction of Jews. Wearing the keffiyeh comes across as saying, “We support the side that slaughters your people.”

So the sight of so many of the scarves beneath the glowing young faces of Bowdoin graduates hits viscerally, a stab to the heart or the stomach, especially for older family members like Raya Katz, who grew up among people with living memory of pogroms and the Holocaust.

For some of us middle-aged parents, the keffiyeh proliferation evokes questions about whether we sent our Jewish children to the right school, if what they learned there was to support terrorism, to misapply words like genocide and apartheid, to attribute “white supremacy” to a multi-colored people and “settler colonialism” to an indigenous group who returned to their ancestral land.

One parent posted online that seeing a commencement speaker draped in “the keffiyeh of the Palestine Liberation Organization—a terrorist organization that killed hundreds of Americans” was so offensive that “if we could have withdrawn from Bowdoin at that point, I would have.”

Others of us cannot help but notice that the diversity and inclusion doctrines that our children have absorbed, the beautiful imperatives to ensure that people of all identity categories feel accepted and safe, seem to apply to all minorities except Jews. Certainly, no one at last year’s commencement seemed concerned about Jewish families’ feelings.

Activists can argue that any Jewish family distress matters little compared to the awful death and destruction in Gaza. That is true. But we would respond: The more hostility toward Jews we see in the world our children inhabit, the more acutely we feel that the state of Israel is necessary as a refuge for all Jews. Each keffiyeh adds to that conviction.

Also, wearing a keffiyeh to the commencement of a superb but obscure college’s commencement does exactly zero to help the suffering people of Gaza. So it causes pain but brings no benefit.

At this year’s commencement, we support your freedom to express yourselves with any symbols and signs you wish. We are not asking for any type of ban on wearing a keffiyeh.

We just want you to know that if you choose to do so, you’ll be hurting some Jewish family members, possibly ruining much of the joy of graduation for them. You can. You are free to. You just need to know that’s what you’re doing, and that, no matter how well-meant, it is not at all kind.