The courts are demanding them, though. I’ve heard of something like this before.
A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the University of Pennsylvania to hand over records about Jewish employees on campus to a federal agency as part of an investigation into antisemitic discrimination but said it did not have to reveal any employee’s affiliation with a specific group.
First, you get a list of all the Jews at the university. Then you fire them, imprison them, and kill them. This was the trend in the 1930s and 1940s, when there were sweeping purges of Jewish professors, led by prominent non-Jewish scientists. Here’s a useful word to remember: Rassenhygiene.
The emergence of eugenics as an ‘applied science’ culminated in the horrendous atrocities committed by the Nazis during the Third Reich. Society was to be cleaned of all alien contamination, hence the German phrase ‘Rassenhygiene’ meaning ‘racial hygiene’. Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and people with hereditary diseases were deprived of their human rights, herded into concentration camps, used for scientific experimentation and murdered. And the scientists who provided the scientific backing were respected university professors or researchers of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (KWS), the predecessor of the Max Planck Society. Many of them remained in renowned positions even after 1945, influential enough to delay an unbiased historical confrontation.
These things sneak up on you. You provide a list for the purposes of “an investigation into antisemitic discrimination,” and next thing you know, Stephen Miller is holding it.
I have another useful word to add to your vocabulary: Lebensborn.
The Lebensborn e.V. (e.V. stands for eingetragener Verein or registered association), meaning “fount of life”, was founded on 12 December 1935,[1] to counteract falling birth rates in Germany, and to promote Nazi eugenics.[2] Located in Munich, the organization was partly an office within the Schutzstaffel (SS) responsible for certain family welfare programs, and partly a society for Nazi leaders.
Sound familiar? This was an organization designed to promote racial purity by determining who was a good Aryan.
The USA doesn’t have an official Lebensborn policy yet, but I note that it is so important to Trump that we end birthright citizenship that he is actually attending Supreme Court hearings today on that subject, an unusual move to use his vast prestige and power to influence a court decision. Let’s hope it backfires on him and that the court decides that the 14th Amendment stands.
On the face of it I can’t see such ill intent in asking for a list of Jewish people to contact for investigation into alleged antisemitism on a university campus as to compare this inquiry to what happened in Nazi Germany. That it could be construed that way does indicate how ill thought out the approach is though. And isn’t Stephen Miller of Jewish descent? His Wikipedia page says he attended Hebrew school. So I’m not sure, even as evil as he is, what need he would have for a list of Jews.
The birthright citizenship issue being brought to SCOTUS with Trump attending is troublesome in itself, especially given what has been happening to immigrants thus far under fascist Trump and his gutstapo thugs. Yet a judge awkwardly asking a university for a list of Jewish people to investigate alleged antisemitism doesn’t seem to me linked to Rassenhygiene, Lebensborn, or the birthright case before SCOTUS.
Why would the university (or any employer for that matter) have this information in the first place?
If anything, the intent of this inquiry seems to me to be more geared toward stifling criticism of Israel by protestors.
From: https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/31/us/upenn-subpoena-jewish-community-list
Some protestors against Israeli atrocities in Gaza (and now in Lebanon again) perhaps crossed the line. And chants like “river to the sea” are a bit over the top IMO alongside keffiyeh appropriating cosplay, but neither criticism of Israel nor protest against Israel are inherently antisemitic.
And I agree that asking for a list of Jews is just a bad idea, plain and simple, but I don’t think the intent is the same as it was in Germany, given it is to investigate alleged antisemitism. Maybe a more passive approach for Jewish employees to voluntarily come forward and offer their takes.
For what it’s worth, Stephen Miller is Jewish. A Jewish Nazi seems like a strange concept, but that’s what he seems to be.
This sounds like a particularly awful April Fools day joke.
There is nothing in the article that gives background on the EEOC investigation beyond the claim that Penn is ‘rife with antisemitism’ because of a swastika spray painted in a student space.
Demanding a list of Jewish people is a strange plan if you are supposedly investigating antisemitism.
Privacy falls under the fourth amendment.
The targets change but the underlying philosophy is the same.
Stephen Miller’s targets are largely the same as the old Nazis but the priorities are different. He is after nonwhites; Latinos, Blacks, and Asians.
These racists aren’t hiding anything.
Their whole idea is to turn American White Again.
Tethys @5
A university getting all up in an employee’s religious views could have a first amendment component. I think it may be about the government demanding info on religious identity from the university, which is itself a private entity though. UPenn being private instead of public kinda muddies things per application of 1A on their part, no? Ideally they would use 1A as a policy guide regardless.
The Guardian article says that federal investigators sometimes request such info to enable them to reach out to possibly affected persons (seems maybe reasonable on the face of it?), but doesn’t say how that’s implemented. I don’t recall any employer or university ever asking me about my religion or ancestry (“Jewish” might refer to either), and I might very well decline to answer such a question from them, so how the hell could they even have complied with an order to report that about me? (Assuming anyone had a particular interest about atheists of English descent, which seems unlikely).
From what I heard, Penn doesn’t ask employees or students about their religion…but the case is about coughing up a list of “members” of student organizations that are considered to be “jewish”.
Still stupid and evil. Maybe ALL of UPenn should sign up for those organizations.
It shouldn’t be up to a judge to do this. If the plaintiffs or the defense want to bring witnesses/anecdotes that they feel are reflective of the “general feeling” or anonymous survey results, they can do so.
A judge deciding to go gather a list and then arbitrarily act on that list (in some currently unspecified way) is utterly wrong. It isn’t the judge’s role to gather evidence other than perhaps researching what is already there through news reports and other published or existing government documents, and often their direction in such things is because of references in the materials presented by the two sides and amicus filings.
This judge should be dismissed.
@hemidactylus
Yes, freedom of religion, freedom of association and free speech fall under the first amendment. However the privacy that they mentioned in the same sentence is covered by the fourth amendment.
I don’t know that Penn has civil rights, but its students and faculty certainly do regardless of their religion or ethnicity. Demanding a list of names of specifically Jewish people isn’t possible unless Penn was violating their civil rights by making such a list in the first place.
You’ll also be wanting to know about Gleichschaltung – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleichschaltung
Both the Trump administration and progressives use Jews as a catspaw this way — Trump wants to prune the influence of universities, and he uses antisemitism in academia as a pretext to intervene. Progressive media outlets want to incite outrage against Trump, so they pretend to believe that measures like this are a prelude to some sort of antisemitic massacre. Of the two, arguably progressives are the more hypocritical, as they’ve spent the past two years repeating every imaginable libel against Jews.