The Ignorant Sociopathic Narcissist Orders Penn to Release ‘List of Jews’

As former Biden White House Press Secretary and current host of MS Now’s prime time program, “The Briefing,” Jen Psaki read and posted the banner headline from the New York Times, I was sent into traumatic shock. It brought back all the horrors I heard about my Polish family after the Nazi invasion and of their torture and murder.

Psaki looked into the camera with a shocked and incredulous expression:

“Trump Administration Drops Subpoena Demanding List of Jews from Penn.”

Ostensibly, the University of Pennsylvania’s leadership refused to submit and cower to the Trump administration’s threats of withholding government grants and other funding if it did not twist to its will.

The Trump regime argued it needed the lists to interview primarily Jewish faculty in documenting supposed antisemitic comments and actions on the campus in order to “protect” Jewish people and organizations. The government claimed that Penn’s resistance had been hyperbolic and radical.

I understand that Donald Trump neither knows about nor cares about history, but even this heartless sociopathic narcissist must know how triggering and insensitive it is to subpoena any institution for its “list of Jews.”

Trump echoed 1936 Germany and the so-called “Nuremberg Laws,” the antisemitic and racist laws the Nazi regime declared known as the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor.

These proclamations codified the systematic persecution of Jews, which culminated in the eventual murder of an estimated six million Jewish people throughout the continent of Europe and elsewhere under the Nazi domain.

Hearing Jen Psaki reading the New York Times’ headline sent me into traumatic shock. It brought back all the horrors I heard about my Polish family following the Nazi invasion.

I felt as if a thick veil covered my eyes, dimming my sight and leaving my body numb of all sensation, my lungs failing to take in air, and my heart crying for help. I heard intangible grunts expelled from my open mouth as my friend, Chris, who had been staying with me ran down the stairway, a shocked and fearful expression plastered upon his face. He took me by the arm and led me to a bed, where he placed me and lay beside me to heal my shaking body and to dry the tears streaming uncontrollably down my face.

I seemingly remained in that suspended semi-conscious state for some time, until the veil began to lift and awareness returned. I can recall only entering this semi-coma one other time.

I just moved to Ames, Iowa where I was to begin a position as a professor at Iowa State University in the School of Education. After unpacking some boxes, my beautiful Italian Greyhound, Hamsa, needed to go outside. I attached her little walking harness and leash, and outside she felt the excitement of the fresh warm and fragrant air.

As we walked down our street, Hamsa led me to a man who was sitting on his front lawn pulling dandelions. As Hamsa walked toward the man, he looked up and said to me, “What a cute dog you have there.”

I thanked him as he continued, “Hi, my name is ____. I don’t recognize you.”

I told him that I am new to the neighborhood, and I just moved two houses away.

“You must be the professor we have been hearing about,” he said. “Welcome to the neighborhood. I myself am a graduate of Iowa State, but that was many years ago. I graduated in biological sciences. What do you teach?”

“Well, my background is as an educational sociologist,” I answered.

After I responded, an unusual, even pained expression flushed his face. “So, you are a social scientist?” he inquired.

“Yes, that is right,” I said although I did not fully comprehend his intent.

Then in my utter disbelief, he quipped: “I heard that social scientists are kikes and Jews who always stick to their own kind.”

That same veil fell upon me. Hamsa sensed my paralysis and led me back to the safety of our new home.

As a queer person, I believe that I have healed from much of the social heterosexism I have endured most of my life. With the loving support of an active community, I have gained the strength to go on to become an activist in our struggles for equality.

I have taught courses and written or edited numerous books on queer topics. When I experience heterosexist remarks, I am confident by responding appropriately by not counter-attacking the perpetrator, but, I hope also to leave an indelible impression that can begin to heal them of the social disease they have contracted.

Antisemitism has a very different effect on me. Though I have lived most of my life within a supportive Jewish community, when anyone attacks me, they simultaneously attack my family and “my people.”

According to Ashkenazi [European heritage] Jewish tradition, a newborn infant is given a name in honor of a deceased relative. The name is formed by taking the entire name or just the initial letter of the name of the ancestor being honored. I had the good fortune of being named after my maternal great-grandfather Wolf Mahler. When I see God, I envision in my consciousness, Wolf with his long black beard and side locks streaming gently from the corners of his hairline.

As it has turned out over the years, Wolf not only has given me my name, but he and my maternal great-grandmother, Bascha Trencher Mahler, also have given me a sense of history and my sense of my identity.

We learned from my grandfather Shimon Mahler’s brother who had eventually escaped into the woods with his wife and young son after the Nazi invasion of Krosno, their Polish town, that Nazi soldiers murdered many members of my family either on the streets of Krosno or about 20 kilometers away in a mass grave in the forest. The Nazis dumped others upon a small hill in the Krosno Jewish cemetery.

The Nazis murdered Wolf in the Krosno ghetto. Other friends and relatives the Nazis eventually loaded into cattle cars and transported them to Auschwitz and Belzec concentration camps.

After the war and continuing today, virtually no Jews reside in Krosno or in all of southwestern Poland.

I fear the world is repeating many of the mistakes of the past. With the continuing rise of fascist nationalist movements throughout the world, viral forms of racism persist, where “ethnic cleansing,” spurred on by religious extremism in many forms, have become the sanitized term for hatred, forced expulsions, relocations, invasions, and murder.

I believe we have entered an era where we can make direct and inextricably linked connections between European fascism of the 1920s through the 1940s with U.S., Middle Eastern, and European fascism in the 20^th century through the current age.

German nationalism, for example, which resulted in the Second World War, was constructed by a party and its leader who manipulated a fearful and angry population to scapegoat others–-primarily Jews, and also homosexuals, Roma–-for the nation’s severe economic problems.

Donald Trump’s march to the White House in 2016 and continuing in 2020 and 2024 in his attempts to recapture the presidency centered on promoting a form of extreme nationalism (jingoism, chauvinism) intent on exciting xenophobic and racist fears and ideologies.

Though he presumably issued his subpoena against the University of Pennsylvania for Jewish “lists” to counter antisemitism, it is part of his divide and conquer strategy as a want-to-be authoritarian “strong man” to separate Jews from other anti-MAGA oppositional forces.

The previous Spanish and Mexican inquisitions of the 15^th century targeted Jews in show trials resulting in mass conversions to Christianity, murder, and expulsions.

The recent Congressional inquisition against female university presidents, and especially against Harvard’s President Claudine Gay, an African American woman, attempted to use the rising tide of antisemitism on Jewish college and university students as MAGA’s pawns in its conspiracy to silence diverse voices, DEI initiatives, and to terminate academic freedom.

The committee has taken lessons learned from conservative state legislatures, boards of education, and governors in placing severe limits mandating what can be discussed and read in the public schools, and it is now attempting to dictate politics against supposed “wokeness” regarding hiring policies and academic standards in higher education.

In fact, Jewish students are among those on the front lines in the fight to expand DEI initiatives as well as racial and gender justice on campuses and throughout the nation.

So, let’s say I am a progressive Jewish faculty member at Penn, and I support Palestinian independence and self-rule. I also believe that the Israeli government has committed genocidal slaughter upon the people of the Gaza Strip and has given license to so-called “Jewish settlers” (a.k.a. land thieves) to rob and murder Palestinians throughout the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Does this make me less of a Jew as defined in Trump’s subpoena?

To be clear and unequivocal: Jews refuse to be used as pawns of the far-right’s Machiavellian project. Not now! Now later! Not ever again!