A federal judge who orders the compilation of lists of Jews, dismisses Jewish historical objections to the compilation of lists of Jews, and wraps it in calm institutional reasoning is performing the function of Nazism. Nothing could be more precise about what “never again” was built to identify than this.

A federal judge dismissing Jewish objections to the creation and compilation of lists of Jews is literally performing Stage One of Raul Hilberg’s destruction process.

Hilberg, the founding scholar of Holocaust studies, identified the “process of destruction” as consisting of stages: definition, expropriation, concentration, and annihilation. These categories have remained the basic framework in Holocaust historiography.

The deep historical scholarship on the Holocaust says you don’t get to call this judge’s order of “Stage One” something else just because he doesn’t post on X, wear an X on his sleeve or carry a Nazi party card.

• Ruether wrote that antisemitism is structural before it is personal.
• Heschel wrote that supersessionism is colonization: the replacement of Jewish meaning with Christian meaning while claiming universality.
• Jackson titled his book after Mordecai, the Jew who wouldn’t bow and was marked for destruction because of it.
• Arendt said the whole Holocaust ran on the calm people like this judge who found Jewish objections to be an inconvenience.

And I believe there is substantial evidence to explain how and why this judge is so antisemitic.

Penn doesn’t have a list. Pappert ordered one

Penn stated it “does not maintain employee lists by religion.” This is critical. Pappert isn’t ordering release of any existing record. He’s ordering a new instrument of identification of Jews. That’s not administrative compliance. That’s creation of the Holocaust mechanism itself. Hilberg’s Stage One speaks to the role of existing lists for targeting and creating new ones. The Germans used “synagogue membership lists” and “routine but mandatory police registration forms” alongside records “provided by neighbors and municipal officials.” The EEOC subpoena demands a list be created with contact information for employees affiliated with Jewish organizations. The parallel of the judge’s words to Nazism is exact.

The Jewish community unanimously opposed

Chabad, Hillel, and MEOR all filed separate briefs opposing the antisemitic subpoena. These aren’t lawyers managing liability. These are the three institutional pillars of Jewish campus life at Penn. The organized Jewish community spoke with one voice: never again.

Pappert unilaterally overrode all of them and went out of his way to erase history. Every Jewish organization intervened in court and was dismissed by a judge for having “unfortunate and inappropriate” concerns about their own fate based on basic history.

The EEOC itself is compromised

The “stated purpose” defense has no legs.

Pappert’s entire reasoning rests on the subpoena having a legitimate purpose. But NPR reported yesterday that the EEOC under Trump-appointed chair Andrea Lucas has set “a new agenda” at odds with the agency’s traditions and mandate.

Trump fired two Democratic commissioners before their terms expired, something “no president had ever done before.” Former EEOC chair Charlotte Burrows called it “a real radical effort to advance one ideological perspective.” The EEOC has explicitly listed “campus antisemitism probes” as a stated enforcement priority under Lucas.

The agency requesting the list of Jews has been purged, captured, and repurposed. Pappert’s reasoning assumes good faith from an institution that has been stripped of it. Pappert’s “understandable purpose” is a concealed threat to Jews. He wrote procedural reasoning to justify “never again” doesn’t exist to him as a moral imperative.

This appears to be because he comes from a formation that trained him to treat objection to state documentation as obstruction, when the objection is the entire point.

Thirty-two pages of measured legal reasoning were created to force a university to compile and hand over lists of Jews to a federal agency, run by known antisemitic extremists who boast the White House is “already 40% Nazis“.

The Jewish community’s objections, rooted in the specific historical knowledge of where this leads, were dismissed by the judge despite having a legitimate concern. His measured erasure of this Jewish concern is what aligns Pappert with the pattern of Nazism. It is the exact calm pattern.

Pappert likely will continue to claim he wrote a ruling about administrative law. The scholarship says he performed the operation of Nazi Germany: took Jewish knowledge, declared it illegible, and replaced it with a Christian-derived framework of erasure he believes is neutral ground.

Nazis were calm and organized, orchestrating erasure of Jews. The entire Holocaust apparatus ran on procedural confidence that the purpose was legitimate and the process was sound. The literature says that’s exactly how it works. The reasonable government administrator, the institutional voice that tells the Jews their pattern recognition is rhetorical excess, is the precise mechanism of oppression and genocide. Not the exception to it.

“Ineptly worded”

Pappert acknowledged the EEOC’s request was “ineptly worded” but ordered compliance anyway. The judge admitted the instrument was flawed and still forced the university to hand over the list. If the request is so badly constructed that even the judge calls it inept, how can Jewish concern about that same request be “unfortunate and inappropriate”?

Pappert’s own language convicts him: the request was bad, the Jews were right to worry, and he ordered compliance anyway.

Supersessionism

Supersessionism is the technical term. It operates as default architecture in people formed by it. Pappert’s Albany-Villanova-Notre Dame (Catholic) pipeline didn’t teach him to recognize Jewish survival knowledge as a legitimate interpretive framework. It taught him that institutions with stated purposes deserve absolute deference to Christian authority, and that people who refuse that deference for any reason are escalating.

The Forward reported days ago that supersessionism is driving modern antisemitism among Christian influencers, with figures like Prejean Boller declaring “The Catholic Church is the True Israel” and “Christians are the spiritual Semites.” The USCCB itself has had to admonish Catholic influencers, pointing to the 2015 Vatican document “The Gifts and Calling of God Are Irrevocable.”

Ruether’s framework says antisemitism is structural before it is personal. Heschel says supersessionism is colonization, the replacement of Jewish meaning with Christian meaning while claiming universality. Jackson says the pattern is Mordecai: the Jew who won’t bow is recast as the problem.

Pappert did all three antisemitic markers in a single ruling.

He replaced Jewish historical knowledge with institutional trust. He claimed his framework was neutral while theirs was emotional. And he told the Jews who wouldn’t bow to the subpoena’s stated purpose that their refusal was the “unfortunate and inappropriate” one, not his own.

Arendt saw it in Jerusalem. The banality wasn’t a footnote. It was the finding. The machinery ran on people like Pappert who trusted process, followed procedure, and found the objections of Jews to be an inconvenience to the orderly functioning of the system that harmed them.

Pappert isn’t at the end of that sequence. He’s at the beginning of it. And “never again” correctly identifies him as the beginning, to prevent the end that he isn’t equipped or willing to prevent.

The American Catholic pipeline didn’t teach Pappert to hate Jews overtly, like the Christian Front, whose Irish-Catholic members organized seditious and antisemitic violence in Boston and New York, or Father Coughlin, the Catholic radio priest whose broadcasts reached tens of millions with pro-Nazi antisemitism he called “buy Christian“. It taught him to refuse to recognize Jewish concerns as structurally legitimate. That’s the more dangerous output.

The scholarship doesn’t hedge

A federal judge ordering the compilation of lists of Jews while dismissing Jewish objections is performing Stage One of Hilberg’s destruction process. The copious literature names Pappert for what he is and why he’s doing it.

“Never again” was built to stop him.

Here is further reading on Pappert’s deeply antisemitic roots and his related ruling:

• USHMM “Locating the Victims” for the direct parallel to institutional record compilation
• Gregory Baum, Is the New Testament Anti-Semitic? (1961)
• Rosemary Ruether, Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism (1974)
• Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus (Princeton, 2008)
• Timothy P. Jackson, Mordecai Would Not Bow Down: Anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and Christian Supersessionism (Oxford, 2021)
• Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (1961, revised 1985) for the stages framework
• Charles Gallagher, Nazis of Copley Square: The Forgotten Story of the Christian Front (Harvard, 2021) for the Irish-Catholic pipeline
• Mary Christine Athans, The Coughlin-Fahey Connection (1991) for the Irish seminary roots of American Catholic antisemitism
• Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust (2001) for how institutional data collection enabled identification