One List Was Built to Hunt Jews. The Other Was Built to Defend Them

Trump’s subpoena got the Holocaust analogies. The mob actually mapping Jews in Italy got a shrug. That reflex isn’t protecting us—it’s spending us.

Yesterday I published a piece about a Google Form in Italy—an anonymous questionnaire asking ordinary Italians to report which hotels and businesses Jews could be found in, for “future actions.” Which is not ominous at all. Nothing nefarious about a mystery account collecting Jewish locations for purposes it declines to name. I compared it to the 1938 census that preceded Italy’s racial laws, because that’s what it was: a list of where the Jews are, built by people who don’t wish the Jews well, answerable to no one.

Within hours, the comments had found a way to make it about Trump.

Not the form. Not Italy. Not the anonymous accounts still sitting on whatever data they collected. The urgent analogy, I was informed, was the EEOC subpoena seeking information about Jewish employees at the University of Pennsylvania—which the administration dropped, as it happens, the very day we were arguing about it. See? A list of Jews. Just like your Google Form. Just like the 1930s.

I spent the evening writing what was, let’s be honest, a fully formed rant in my own comments section, one reply at a time. So I’m bringing it up here, where the light is better—because clearly some of us need to hear it.

What Actually Happened at Penn

Walk the timeline, because almost everyone invoking it has it garbled. In July 2025, the EEOC—investigating workplace antisemitism at Penn after October 7—subpoenaed records including antisemitism complaints, names of members of Jewish campus groups, and Jewish Studies employees. Penn refused. The EEOC sued to enforce. A federal judge ordered Penn to comply. Penn got the order paused and appealed. And this week, before the appeals court ever ruled, the EEOC withdrew the subpoena entirely. Penn says not one name was ever turned over.

Notice what that story is full of: lawyers, judges, a university that said no and made it stick. However you feel about the subpoena, it lived and died inside a system where the target could fight back—and won without surrendering a single name. And for what it’s worth, from someone who spent a decade representing employers on the receiving end of these requests: asking for information about the group alleging discrimination is how these cases get built for every protected class. It’s how you find the witnesses. It only became a national scandal when the group was Jews and the administration was this one.

The Part Where I Don’t Pick a Side

Here’s what I’m not going to do: tell you Penn should have handed over the list.

The subpoena was broad—membership in Jewish organizations sweeps in far more people than a complaint file. Lists of Jews carry a history that needs no explaining on this blog. Data can be abused, by anyone who holds it. Penn’s lawyers thought the demand went too far, and they may have been right. There are real arguments on both sides, and I hold my own view loosely.

But look where that fight happened: in a courtroom, on the record, with a judge in the room. “No” was an available answer. Penn said it, twice, and the demand died in daylight. You can think the subpoena was overreach and still recognize that fighting it—and winning—is what the rule of law looks like. What its absence looks like is a list no one can enjoin.

Now Run the Comparison You’re Actually Making

The process is the obvious difference. It isn’t the deepest one.

Here’s what everyone reaching for the comparison forgets: the 1938 census wasn’t secret. It was official—government-run, stamped and filed in the open. What made it the first act of the persecution wasn’t secrecy, and it wasn’t the absence of a courtroom. It was what it was for: to find the Jews so the state could move against them.

So run the comparison on the thing that actually decides it—not the paperwork, the purpose. The Italian form exists to catalog where Jews sleep, for “future actions” against them, by people who will never show their face. The Penn subpoena existed to gather evidence for an investigation into antisemitism—one opened because Jewish employees said they were the ones being targeted. One list is built to hunt Jews. The other was built to defend them. That is not a technicality; it is the whole difference. As I finally wrote in my own comments: one is an investigation into antisemitism. The other is antisemitism.

And yet guess which one set off the Holocaust alarms in my feed. The people reaching for the 1930s over a subpoena scrolled right past an actual anonymous map of Jews to get there. Not one of them had a sentence to spare for Italy. The alarm, apparently, only sounds when the villain has the right last name.

The Football

Which tells you what the analogy is actually for. It’s not a smoke detector for Jewish danger. It’s a move in an American political fight, and Jews are the ammunition. If the 1930s comparison fired on Jewish risk, it would have gone off yesterday, loudly, about Italy. It fired about Trump, because the point was never us. We’re the gravitas—borrowed, spent, and returned to the shelf until the next news cycle needs a Nazi.

And to be very clear, because this is not a pro-Trump anything: the football gets thrown from both ends of the field. An administration that wraps hardball politics in our safety is using us too, and I’ve said so in these pages. That’s exactly why the reflex matters. When every side’s worst-faith argument comes gift-wrapped in Jewish suffering, the comparison stops meaning anything—and the one currency Jews cannot afford to have devalued is the memory of the thing that actually happened to us. Every fake 1938 spends down the alarm we’ll need for a real one. Invoking the Holocaust to score points off an investigation into anti-Jewish discrimination—while ignoring an actual list of Jews built by an actual mob—isn’t remembrance. It’s inversion. And it is exhausting.

Where the Alarm Belongs

So here’s my ask, and it isn’t partisan. Before you reach for the worst thing that ever happened to us, ask one question: who is the list for? Penn’s was for the Jewish employees who reported being targeted—the whole point was to find out what was done to them. The Italian form’s is for whoever wants to use it. One was built to protect us. The other was built to find us. And the people who built it are still out there—still anonymous, still holding the data, still owed a fraction of the outrage my comments section spent on a subpoena.

Get Up Off the Floor

Yesterday was also Tisha B’Av—the day Jews sit on the floor and mourn every catastrophe in our history—and a colleague sent our team an old version of a story most of us know. Napoleon passes a synagogue on the ninth of Av and finds the Jews weeping on the ground over a Temple lost eighteen centuries earlier. In the famous telling, he’s awed: a nation that still mourns its Temple will live to see it rebuilt. In the older telling my colleague dug up, Napoleon just smiles and says, “By sitting on the floor you will never regain Jerusalem.”

I can’t stop thinking about the difference. One version praises how we remember. The other asks what our remembering is for. And a Holocaust analogy deployed to win a comment thread is the emptiest kind of remembering there is—grief converted into a talking point, aimed at nothing, protecting no one. Our memory was never meant to be furniture for other people’s arguments. It’s supposed to put us on our feet.

If the 1930s are on your mind, good. They’re on mine every day.

But the alarm is supposed to go off for the Jews. Stop building it out of us.