Updated 1/26/2026
The University of Pennsylvania pushed back on the Trump administration’s subpoena to turn over lists of Jewish faculty, staff and students in a court filing on Jan. 20, calling the demand “unconstitutional” and “unnecessary.”
The subpoena, which was originally issued in July 2025, requests that the university create and disclose a list of all Jewish and Jewish-affiliated campus organizations, alongside a roster of their members with personal contact information, as part of the Trump administration’s investigation into allegations of antisemitic harassment on Penn’s campus.
Penn denied the request, citing privacy concerns of said members and First Amendment violations. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission then filed for an enforcement of the subpoena in November, as reported by Philadelphia Jewish Exponent
“The EEOC insists that Penn produce this information without the consent—and indeed, over the objections—of the employees impacted while entirely disregarding the frightening and well-documented history of governmental entities that undertook efforts to identify and assemble information regarding persons of Jewish ancestry,” the university wrote in its filing. “The government’s demand implicates Penn’s substantial interest in protecting its employees’ privacy, safety, and First Amendment rights.”
Penn’s position about the EEOC’s subpoena was supported in court filings by Rabbi Rick Fox, the executive director of MEOR Penn, Rabbi Gabriel F. Greenberg, the executive director of Penn Hillel, and Rabbi Menachem Schmidt, the co-executive director of Chabad at Penn, according to JTA.
The university’s filing comes after the ACLU of Pennsylvania and a coalition of Jewish students and scholars, including the American Academy of Jewish Research and the Jewish Law Students Association of the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, filed a motion to intervene in the case on Jan. 13.
“In effect, these requests would require Penn to create and turn over a centralized registry of Jewish students, faculty, and staff — a profoundly invasive and dangerous demand that intrudes deeply into the freedoms of association, religion, speech, and privacy enshrined in the First Amendment,” the intervening groups stated in the court filing to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.
A motion to intervene is a formal request made by third parties to join an existing lawsuit, allowing them to become an official party to the litigation.
“Such compelled disclosure will be experienced as a visceral threat to the safety of those who would find themselves so identified because compiling and turning over to the government “lists of Jews” conjures a terrifying history,” the intervening parties stated in their filing.
Among those joining the motion to intervene is the American Association of University Professors, which stated in a press release that, “To demand that Penn create and compile lists of Jewish people—particularly those active in political causes disfavored by the government—evokes the disturbing history of twentieth-century antisemitism.”
“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,” said Steven Phillip Weitzman, a professor of Hebrew and Semitic Languages and Literatures at UPenn, in an ACLU of Pennsylvania press release earlier this month.
In November, the EEOC released a statement announcing its request for subpoena enforcement, arguing that it needs the information to contact potential witnesses and victims of the antisemitic claims.
“This is an atrocious abuse of government power. Under the thinnest and most questionable pretense, this administration is attempting to force the disclosure of Jewish groups’ membership rosters,” said Ambassador (ret.) Norman Eisen, executive chair of the Democracy Defenders Fund, in the ACLU press release. “Such conduct drags us back to one of the darkest chapters in our history. The Supreme Court rejected this kind of compelled identification decades ago for a reason: it chills free expression, endangers religious liberty, and weaponizes the law against marginalized communities. We should be moving forward in protecting civil rights, not turning back the clock.”
I wish Penn stood up to the radicals attacking Jews on their campus as hard as they stood up to the EEOC’s rational requests.