To this point, I’ve resisted the urge to label Trump, his administration, or his supporters as neo-Nazis or neo-Fascists. However, it’s getting harder and harder to resist the urge and maintain my sanity. Almost buried in the Gish Gallop of daily outrages, corruption, and incompetencies is this story reported in The Guardian:
The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is demanding [University of Pennsylvania] turn over names and personal information about Jewish members of the Penn community as part of the administration’s stated goal to combat antisemitism on campuses. But some Jewish faculty and staff have condemned the government’s demand as “a visceral threat to the safety of those who would find themselves identified because compiling and turning over to the government ‘lists of Jews’ conjures a terrifying history”, according to a press release put out by the groups’ lawyers.
The EEOC subpoenaed UPenn on 18 November 2025, but I went back through and saw just this one Dkos diary. Here we are, then, with an update necessary because, according to The Guardian and numerous other sources, “the American Association of University Professors’ national and Penn chapters, the university’s Jewish Law Students Association and Association of Senior and Emeritus Faculty, and the American Academy of Jewish Research filed a motion in federal court to intervene in the case.”
On Tuesday, the American Association of University Professors’ national and Penn chapters, the university’s Jewish Law Students Association and its Association of Senior and Emeritus Faculty, and the American Academy of Jewish Research filed a motion in federal court to intervene in the case. At a Tuesday press conference hosted by the Pennsylvania branch of the ACLU, Steven Phillip Weitzman, professor of Hebrew and Semitic Languages and Literatures at UPenn, had this to say:
To put things bluntly, I don’t want my employer handing over information about my religious identity without my consent, and I see it as a violation of the First Amendment for the government to be forcing the university to do so. The government cannot guarantee that the information it accumulates about Jews won’t fall into the wrong hands.
I hope that I don’t sound disrespectul or glib when I suggest that handing over any information about one’s religious identity to this administration almost guarantees that it’s ended up in the wrong hands in the first place, never mind with whom it might share that information without notification or consent.
Even if the EEOC’s ostensible original motivation for seeking this information is a response to a wave of anti-Semitic protests on campuses following Israel’s invasion of Gaza following Hamas’s 7 October 2023, attack, it gets hard to square that motivation with so many of Trump’s own statements and those of members of his administration, and the statements and actions of so many of his supporters. To put it mildly, their commitment to stamping out antisemitism is mixed, at best.
Back to the EEOC’s subpoena. It requests, in part, the following:
a list of all clubs, groups, organizations and recreation
groups (hereinafter referred to as “organizations”) related to the Jewish religion, faith,ancestry/National Origin. For each organization listed, produce the followinginformation:
a. Name of organization;
b. Indicate if the organization is run by employees and/or volunteers;
c. Identify the organization Point of Contact by first and last name;
d. Produce the organizations Point of Contact’s contact information to includephone number, email address and mailing address;
e. Produce a roster of organization members. For each member listed, indicate ifthey are a University employee or volunteer;
f. For employees identified on the roster, produce their last known contact information to include personal phone number, email address and mailing address; and,
g. Produce the organization’s website, if applicable.
If EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas is unfamiliar with why Jewish citizens would feel deeply uneasy at the idea of a federal government demanding such an extensive, detailed list of Jewish Americans, she is either (a) unfit to lead an agency known as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, (b) stunningly ignorant of Jewish history, or, dare I say it, (c) both.
Start with the basic question: why is this information demanded of Jewish members of the UPenn community when the ostensible goal is to protect them from antisemitic attacks? Wouldn’t resources be better spent devoting to identify possible perpetrators of such attacks? I suppose that a case could be made for encouraging individuals to share information for the sake of their own protection, but that’s not what Trump’s EEOC is doing. It’s demanding that the University itself release very private, very personal information well beyond what might be necessary for protecting Jewish members of the UPenn community from attack.
Professor Weitzman went on to say this:
Part of what sets off alarm bells for people like me is a history of people using Jewish lists against Jews. The Nazi campaign against Jews depended on institutions like universities handing over information about their Jewish members to the authorities.
There. Weitzman has drawn a straight connecting together two dots for anyone unclear on the concept. Now, Trump said on Monday about antisemites that “I think we don’t need them. I think we don’t like them.” It would be more comforting, and less chilling, for him to speak less equivocally than to preface both statements with that “I think...” It bespeaks a certain lack of conviction from a man more likely to indulge in overindulgent hyperbole such as when he anointed himself “the least antisemitic person probably there is anywhere.”
It would be a heck of a lot more comforting, I think, if he were to command EEOC Chair Lucas to drop this subpoena. It echoes all too deeply with one of the darkest periods in history. The echoes are getting stronger and stronger, harder and harder to ignore, to downplay, or, if we’re not careful, to resist.
Find and follow me on Bluesky and Twitter… if you’re so inclined.
