‘I’m Spartacus!’

Another Way Jews are Not Safe on American College Campuses

A scene near the conclusion of the 1960 film “Spartacus” portrays the Roman commander Crassus offering to save the lives of captured slaves if any of them turn over the living or dead body of Spartacus, a slave accused of insurrection. Instead, in an act of defiance and solidarity, each of Spartacus’s fellow slaves, one by one in a growing crescendo, declares “I’m Spartacus!”, to protect him from the Roman decree.

For some in the film industry, this landmark sequence served as a powerful metaphor for resistance that just might have referred (wink, nod) to the brave and defiant actors, writers, and production team members who were willing to defy the Hollywood Blacklist at a time when people refused to ‘name names’. In its cinematic context, this scene elevates those who would stand in the breach and, in an act of defiance, protect someone worthy of salvation.

I remembered this film sequence when reading this week, the news of a federal judge who, this past Tuesday, approved the petition of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to order the University of Pennsylvania submit a list of Jews on campus so that the EEOC could purportedly investigate occurrences of antisemitism.

According to a New York Times story, the EEOC’s scrutiny, in fact, united Penn administrators and Jewish students and faculty members in opposition to the EEOC subpoena. Jews on campus compared the government’s demand with the actions deployed in Nazi Germany to discover the Jews hiding in plain sight in society.

If I could, I’d invite everyone on campus to declare in many voices that they were Jewish, to demonstrate the dangerously invasive nature of this EEOC request and to protect the privacy of the Jews on campus.

This would be similar to the public reaction to the proposal of a “Muslim Registry” that surfaced during the 2016 presidential campaign. At that time, thousands of non-Muslim Americans, including prominent figures, like former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and ADL head Jonathan Greenblatt, declared on social media and in op-eds: “If you create a registry for Muslims, register me as a Muslim.” By flooding a potential registry with people who were not actually Muslim, they sought to make the registry both functionally useless and morally indefensible.

Further, in February 2017, shortly after the first travel ban was issued in relation to Muslim countries, thousands gathered in Times Square for a rally titled “I Am A Muslim, Too.” This was a rally organized by various faith leaders and celebrities, who promoted the message that an attack on one faith’s civil liberties was an attack on all.

Issues of religion and faith are, still, a private matter in our country and must be protected from any government scrutiny. If the EEOC wishes to discover the nature and extent of antisemitism on campus, let them ask everyone on campus in a general way to offer testimony. I am sure they’d soon get a picture of the true discrimination that exists on that campus without causing more discrimination, antisemitism, and civil rights violations through their actions.