Mike Haubrich at Miscellany Room:

Hey, there’s even more alarming fuckery coming from the Trump admin, from the EEOC no less. They are demanding a list of Jews at UPenn.

The Guardian:

The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is demanding the university 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.

Daily Kos:

I hope that I don’t sound disrespectful 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. 

Both. It has to be both.