In the wake of the October 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel, allegations of antisemitism surged on American campuses, including at the University of Pennsylvania. In response, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) launched a Title VII investigation and subpoenaed Penn for the names and contact information of faculty and staff affiliated with Jewish organizations and Jewish Studies programs. Penn resisted. Faculty groups intervened. The phrase that reverberated through court filings and headlines was chillingly simple: a government demand for “lists of Jews.” For many Jewish faculty, this was not merely a legal dispute. It was a trauma trigger. The question writes itself: Do we have to act antisemitic to combat antisemitism?
The government’s argument: neutral fact-finding
From the EEOC’s perspective, the subpoena was a routine investigative tool. The agency had received a sworn charge alleging a hostile work environment for Jewish employees. To determine whether discrimination had occurred, it needed to identify and interview potential victims and witnesses. The district court agreed. On March 31, Judge Gerald Pappert ruled that the EEOC was acting within its broad statutory authority as a neutral fact-finder and ordered Penn to comply. He rejected the university’s constitutional objections and rebuked comparisons to Nazi registries as “unfortunate and inappropriate.”
Importantly, the court imposed a modification: Penn was required to provide contact information, but not to identify which specific Jewish organization any employee belonged to. The ruling attempted to balance investigatory necessity with sensitivity to religious affiliation. In legal terms, this was a question of scope and tailoring. In moral and psychological terms, it was a question of safety, memory, and trust. A trauma-informed lens asks not only whether an action is legally justified, but whether it may unintentionally retraumatize those it intends to protect.
The historical echo
Jewish intervenors did not raise the specter of Nazi Germany lightly. For Jews, state-compiled lists based on religious identity are not abstractions. They are historical instruments of exclusion, expulsion, dispossession, and extermination. Trauma is not confined to individual experience; it can be collective and intergenerational. Cultural memory is encoded not only in textbooks but in family stories, rituals, silences, and inherited vigilance. When a government entity requests identification of Jews as Jews, even for protective purposes, it can activate deeply embedded historical fear.
Even if the EEOC’s motives were protective rather than punitive, the mechanism, cataloguing Jews for government review, triggered collective memory. In the context of rising antisemitic harassment, threats, and violence nationally, many Jewish faculty viewed the subpoena not as reassurance but as risk. Here lies the paradox: a civil rights agency seeking to protect Jewish employees by compelling the university to identify them. But intent and impact do not always align. Trauma-informed practice recognizes this divergence as central, not peripheral to healing historically wounded communities.
The broader climate
Violence against Jews is escalating worldwide. Costs for synagogue security in the U.S. exceed $765 million annually, and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) data shows that 69 percent of religiously motivated hate crimes target Jews, who comprise roughly 2 percent of the U.S. population. Jewish professionals describe anxiety at work, professional exclusion, and strained collegial relationships. Many institutions have increased physical security, restricted access to events, and advised discretion in public identification. Safety has become procedural in a climate of vulnerability. And there are much larger implications: A nation that cannot protect its Jews cannot protect itself. In trauma-informed systems, we understand that when a community already feels unsafe, additional identification, however benignly framed, can amplify hypervigilance. Being placed, however carefully, on a government list can feel less like protection and more like exposure.
The core tension: means and ends
At the heart of the controversy is a philosophical and psychological question about civil rights enforcement. To combat discrimination, agencies often must identify members of the protected class. Investigating racial discrimination requires identifying race; investigating gender discrimination requires identifying gender. Why should religion be different? The answer is not that religion is different in law. It is that antisemitism carries a distinct historical valence. The Jewish experience uniquely intertwines religious, ethnic, and cultural identity with centuries of state-sponsored persecution. Lists are not neutral artifacts in that history. Yet the alternative, refusing to identify potential victims, risks rendering antisemitism unenforceable. A discrimination regime that cannot identify who is being harmed cannot protect them. Thus, we confront two moral imperatives:
- Do not single out Jews in ways that replicate historical persecution.
- Do not ignore antisemitism for fear of appearing to single out Jews.
A trauma-informed framework adds a third imperative:
- Do not dismiss the psychological meaning of the method simply because the legal authority exists.
The court’s compromise, providing contact information without organizational labels, reflects an attempt to thread this needle. It acknowledges the need for sensitivity while preserving the EEOC’s investigatory authority. Whether that compromise is sufficient remains contested, as Penn plans to appeal.
Acting antisemitic vs. looking antisemitic
There is a difference between acting antisemitic and employing a method that evokes antisemitic history. Antisemitism is hatred, exclusion, or discrimination against Jews as Jews. The EEOC’s stated purpose was the opposite: to investigate and potentially remedy discrimination against Jewish employees. But trauma-informed analysis reminds us that perception and experience matter. Protective mechanisms that resemble historical tools of oppression can undermine trust, even if the legal analysis is sound and the intent benevolent. In medicine, trauma-informed care requires attention not only to what we do, but to how it is experienced by the patient. We avoid unnecessary retraumatization. We explain procedures. We seek consent where possible. We recognize historical mistrust. The same principles apply institutionally. Legal sufficiency does not guarantee psychological safety.
A better framework
So, how do we combat antisemitism without reenacting its imagery? A trauma-informed approach would emphasize several principles: First, investigative necessity must be narrowly tailored and transparent, with clear explanation of purpose, scope, and safeguards. Second, Jewish communities must be engaged as partners in the investigative process, not merely as subjects of inquiry. Collaboration builds trust; unilateral action can erode it. Third, enforcement strategies should explicitly acknowledge historical trauma rather than dismiss references to it as rhetorical excess. Recognition is not concession; it is respect. Fourth, institutional responses should prioritize confidentiality protections and clearly communicate limits on data use, retention, and dissemination. Fifth, antisemitism should be addressed within a broader, principled commitment to combating all forms of hatred, so that Jewish protection is neither isolated nor instrumentalized. The goal is neither paralysis nor overreach. It is proportionality informed by psychological insight.
The answer
No, we do not have to act antisemitic to combat antisemitism. But we do have to recognize that tools of protection can resemble tools of persecution when history and trauma are insufficiently considered. The Penn case illustrates the uneasy terrain of modern civil rights enforcement: The state must sometimes categorize to protect, yet categorization itself can wound. A trauma-informed approach does not abandon enforcement. Nor does it equate civil rights investigation with historical atrocity. Instead, it insists that institutions account for lived experience alongside legal authority. Combating antisemitism requires moral clarity. It also requires psychological literacy and moral imagination. We can defend Jews without rendering them objects of bureaucratic scrutiny. We can investigate discrimination without replicating its shadows. The deeper question is whether we can guarantee that the fight against hatred never borrow, even inadvertently, the architecture of the hatred it seeks to defeat.
Arthur Lazarus is a former Doximity Fellow, a member of the editorial board of the American Association for Physician Leadership, and an adjunct professor of psychiatry at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University in Philadelphia. He is the author of several books on narrative medicine and the fictional series Real Medicine, Unreal Stories. His forthcoming book, a novel, is The New Eugenics in Medicine: Two Novellas About Power, Science, and the Future of Human Worth.
