Federal Judge Orders Penn to Hand Over Jewish Employee Data to EEOC

A federal judge ruled that the University of Pennsylvania must comply with a government subpoena seeking the personal home addresses, phone numbers, and email contacts of Jewish faculty, staff, and students, a decision that could expand the federal government's power to demand religious-identity information from universities across the country.

U.S. District Court Judge Gerald J. Pappert of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania issued the order on Monday, giving Penn until May 1 to respond to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's demands. Pappert carved out one limit: Penn will not be required to reveal any employee's affiliation with a specific Jewish-related organization. The ruling closes a months-long legal standoff that drew interventions from civil liberties groups, Jewish faculty coalitions, and former senior government lawyers.

The EEOC investigation was opened in December 2023, during the Biden administration, by then-Commissioner Andrea Lucas, now EEOC Chair under the Trump administration, who alleged a pattern of harassment against Jewish employees in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. The agency formally subpoenaed Penn on July 23, 2025, and filed suit against Penn's Board of Trustees in November 2025 when the university refused to hand over personal identifying information. Penn had already provided over 100 documents totaling nearly 900 pages before drawing the line on personal data.

At a four-hour hearing on March 10, Penn's attorney, former U.S. Solicitor General Seth Waxman, argued the charge was "not nearly specific enough to be justified" and raised First Amendment concerns, invoking historical precedents without directly naming Nazi Germany. "We are not equating the EEOC with 1938," Waxman told the court. "But there are very, very valid First Amendment concerns." EEOC regional attorney Debra Lawrence pushed back, calling the subpoena a "garden-variety" request and framing it as identifying "potential victims and witnesses," not a religious list. Judge Pappert challenged both sides, questioning whether ruling for Penn would hamper future antisemitism investigations and stating flatly, "No one has a constitutional right to feel comfortable."

Opposition to the ruling was swift and broad. The ACLU of Pennsylvania, Democracy Defenders Fund, and the law firm Hangley Aronchick Segal Pudlin & Schiller intervened on behalf of five Penn-affiliated groups, including the American Association of University Professors and the American Academy of Jewish Research. The Penn Faculty Alliance to Combat Antisemitism, a coalition of more than 150 primarily Jewish professors, filed a brief warning that the subpoena's scope "invokes the troubling historical persecution of Jews and threatens the personal security" of its members. Hundreds of additional Penn community members signed a petition opposing the demand.

Steven Phillip Weitzman, a Penn professor of Hebrew and Semitic Languages and Literatures, said he did not want his employer surrendering information about his religious identity without his consent, adding that "the government cannot guarantee that the information it accumulates about Jews won't fall into the wrong hands." Norm Eisen, an attorney representing some of the intervening groups and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, warned that the order effectively created a list identifying Jewish individuals on campus. Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, called the subpoena "an abuse of power that singles out members of a religious community."

Lawyers opposing the subpoena also pointed to the Department of Government Efficiency's reported access to sensitive federal data as an additional argument against centralizing private religious-identity information in government hands.

Penn is not alone. The EEOC has launched similar antisemitism probes at Columbia University and California State University. Columbia settled its investigation for $21 million, described as the largest EEOC public settlement in nearly 20 years for any form of discrimination or harassment, as part of a broader $200 million agreement with the federal government. The Penn case, docketed as 2:25-cv-06502, is expected to be appealed, and its outcome could determine how far the EEOC's investigative reach extends into the religious and ethnic identities of university employees nationwide.