At Penn, we’re all Jews now

Are you Jewish?

If you work at the University of Pennsylvania, the Trump administration wants to know. And we don’t want to tell them.

I say “we” not just because I’m Jewish and teach at Penn. I haven’t met a single person at the university — of any faith background — who thinks that handing over the names of our Jewish employees to the government is a good idea.

So I’ve got a different idea: Everyone at Penn should say they’re Jewish, whether they are or not. If you don’t want the government collecting the names of Jews, simply add your own name to one of the Jewish groups on campus. And nobody will be able to determine who is a “real” Jew, which is a fool’s errand anyhow.

Last year, in its effort to investigate antisemitism at Penn, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) subpoenaed the university for the names and phone numbers of employees who were members of Jewish-themed organizations.

Penn balked, claiming that providing that information would violate the privacy of its workers and also make people wary of joining such groups in the future. But last month, a federal district judge ruled that Penn had to comply with the subpoena. And last week, the university asked a federal circuit court for a stay of that order, and announced that it would appeal the judge’s decision.

The university already offered to notify all employees of the government’s investigation and to inform them about how to cooperate with it. But that wasn’t good enough for the EEOC. It wants names.

So let’s give them names. All of our names. If you want to show solidarity with Jews, stand in lockstep with them.

That’s what happened in Sweden in 2012, after a rabbi was assaulted in the port city of Malmö. Hundreds of non-Jews donned kippahs — the head covering worn by Jews to signal reverence for God — and marched through the streets. Two years later, thousands of people in Stockholm staged a similar “Kippah Walk” following a series of antisemitic incidents.

“In the past years, Sweden’s Jewish community has sometimes felt lonely,” declared Sweden’s minister for integration, proudly displaying his kippah. “Today, we are here to show our Jewish minority that we support them, and they are not alone.”

And in 2019, after a government official in Germany warned Jews that wearing kippahs in public could subject them to violence, the country’s most popular daily newspaper published a cutout kippah and asked readers to wear it as a sign of support for the Jewish community. That came on the heels of a spike in physical attacks against Jews, which had nearly doubled in the previous two years.

“If even one person in our country cannot wear the kippah without putting themselves in danger, then the only answer must be that we all wear the kippah,” the paper’s editor-in-chief urged.

And if even one person is identified by the government as Jewish, we must all identify as Jewish. Fortunately, Jews at Penn have not been subject to the kind of assaults that our brothers and sisters in Germany faced. But we also know our history: When the state starts to list Jews, bad things happen to us.

Is there antisemitism at American universities? Of course, there is. We saw that after the 2023 Hamas attack on Israel and the subsequent Israeli war in Gaza. At Cornell, a student was arrested after allegedly threatening to rape and kill Jewish students. And at Cooper Union in New York, Jewish students took refuge in the library while pro-Palestinian protesters banged on windows and doors.

That’s why faculty members at dozens of universities across the country have established organizations to counter antisemitism. At Penn, we also created a task force to investigate prejudice against Jews on campus.

Now the Trump administration wants — you guessed it — the names of faculty and staff who participated in the task force’s listening sessions. And maybe we’ll be forced to reveal them if we lose the next court battle.

But we can still win this war if everyone on campus joins Penn Faculty Against Antisemitism. And if you don’t like that group’s pro-Israel politics, start your own Jewish-themed organization. Enlist as many people as you can, no matter their religion. Then let’s see the Trump administration try to figure out who is who.

Say it loud, and say it proud: We are all Jews now. And nobody will be able to tell the difference between us, which is exactly as it should be.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of “Whose America?: Culture Wars in the Public Schools.”