This is never a good thing.
So, when the university that granted me my doctorate and
educated four generations of my family was
asked by the Trump administration in July for lists of Jewish faculty
members, I held my breath. Would I be able to continue to be proud of the
University of Pennsylvania, the place I learned so much from?
In the past year, universities have varied widely in their responses to demands from the Trump administration to fall into line on ridding their campuses of wokeness and antisemitism. Columbia University (my undergraduate alma mater) settled with the administration, paying $21 million in return for restoring its federal research grants.
It’s hard to see how cutting basic science research will help reduce
antisemitism. It will likely only cause Jews’ presence at a university to be
seen as somehow disruptive. (See the recent
arguments that women ruined the workplace.)
Other universities have variously complied with
administration demands or resisted, but a few, such as Barnard College
of Columbia University and the University of California, Berkeley, acquiesced
and shared personal cellphone numbers of Jewish faculty. (Penn
refused, and is now being sued by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission.) Nara Milanich, a Barnard history professor, said it
reminded her of 1930s Italy, when lists of Jews were put together by the local
government. “We’ve seen this movie before, and it ends with yellow stars,” she
said.
It also troubled Milanich that the government appeared to be
“fishing” for reports of antisemitism: According to the Forward,
the University of California, Berkeley said it had provided the names of 160
individuals involved in cases of antisemitism. “Evidently, they don’t
have sufficient people to file lawsuits, so they have to go shake the trees to
find people?” said Milanich.
Lists of Jews are never a good thing. Amanda Shanor, a
professor at the Wharton School and Penn’s law school, told
The Daily Pennsylvanian, the student newspaper: “The history of government
demands for lists of Jewish people is one of the most terrifying in world
history. I hope that students, faculty, and staff — Jewish and non-Jewish alike
— will tell their family and friends about the government’s demand for a list
of Penn’s Jews.”
Another Penn professor, Sigal Ben-Porath, wrote, “In 1941, the Dutch government had the Jews register as such — and this is how Nazis found many of my family members.”
On a trip to Amsterdam’s Holocaust museum in March with my
college-age daughter, I saw firsthand the effects of those lists — the thick
book containing the names of over 100,000 Dutch
Jews who perished during World War II, along with a memorial
to them. In front of our hotel was another list of sorts — a Stolpersteine, a marker of the
names, birth and death dates of four Jews who had lived in the building where
we were then staying. It was awful to imagine those who had been alive where we
were, taken off to camps to die.
We toured the hiding place, the secret annex, of Anne Frank
and her family, where they were betrayed at the very end of the war, sent on
the very last convoy to Auschwitz, so tragically close to survival.
I later learned from Dina Kraft’s excellent book on the life
of Frank’s friend Hannah Pick-Goslar, “My
Friend Anne Frank,” who did survive the war, that Anne’s father, Otto
Frank, had twice applied to go to the United States. The first time they were
denied, the Franks left Germany for what they hoped was the relative safety of
the Netherlands. The second time, despite being sponsored by Nathan Straus,
whose family owned Macy’s and other stores, they were again turned down by U.S.
immigration authorities, as Pamela Nadell recounts in her new history
of antisemitism in America. Just one member of the family, Otto, survived.
But the same day we saw the secret annex, we saw the
Dutch Resistance Museum, which chronicles the many acts of resistance in
the Netherlands by individuals and groups, including ministers and journalists.
One diorama in the exhibit is dedicated to a man who blew up the government
building that housed the country’s citizenship records, making it easier to
forge documents credibly, as there were no longer any originals to compare them
to. A map of Jewish neighborhoods was accompanied by letters of family members
arguing over whether to register with the agency that made the maps.
“Don’t obey in advance,” I thought to myself silently. They
could have hidden and lived had the authorities not known where to find
them.
The day we visited the museum was the eve of the Jewish
holiday of Purim, on which Jews fast to commemorate the fast of Esther, related
in the Bible’s Book
of Esther. Purim is a holiday of human action against oppression and mass
slaughter. Esther gathered the Jews to pray and fast and they were able to
combat their foes — and succeed. This is why resistance — and Purim — is an
“enduring obligation,” in the
words of professor Wendy Zierler. According to Maimonides’
Laws of the Megillah, “All the books of the Prophets and all the Writings
will be annulled in the days of the Messiah, apart from Megillat Esther.”
Ben-Porath, the Penn professor, whose family hails from the
Netherlands, wrote:
“In 1941, the Dutch government had the Jews register as such — and this is how
Nazis found many of my family members. Jews at Penn and beyond have diverse
views on politics, and on the efforts to fight antisemitism; I do think we are
united in our strong opposition to being put on a list.”
Human resistance — by printing brochures and letters of
opposition, hiding those who are being sought or not turning over lists — has
been possible in the past, as the Dutch Resistance Museum documented, and for
all time. It should be now as well. No university should be making lists of
faculty members of certain religions if the university cares about the
well-being of the faculty and their families.
(Beth Kissileff is co-editor of “Bound
in the Bond of Life: Pittsburgh Writers Reflect on the Tree of Life Tragedy.”
The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of
RNS.)
