Federal judge Gerald J. Pappert ruled on March 31 that the University of Pennsylvania must provide the Trump administration with names of Jewish community members by May 1. The subpoena came from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission as part of an antisemitism investigation — the same wave of federal campus probes that has reached Harvard, UCLA, and others over the past year.
Penn and campus Jewish leaders had filed briefs calling the requests "disturbing and unconstitutional." Judge Pappert rejected those arguments, writing that the request, "though ineptly worded, had an understandable purpose — to obtain in a narrowly tailored way information on individuals in Penn's Jewish community who could have experienced or witnessed antisemitism in the workplace." One limitation: Penn does not have to identify which specific Jewish organizations individuals belong to, only that they are affiliated with Jewish groups.
The ruling lands in a moment already saturated with alarm. The government is not investigating antisemitism to protect Jewish people in any traditional civil rights sense — it is using antisemitism as a legal framework to surveil and pressure universities that the administration has targeted on other grounds. The fact that it is Jewish people whose names are being collected, and that Jewish campus leaders are among those objecting most loudly, is the detail that makes this something different from a routine civil rights subpoena. People who see the historical echoes in a government-ordered list of Jews are not being dramatic.
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