The Question No One Is Asking: How, Exactly, Do You Identify “Who Is Jewish”?
A ruling in the University of Pennsylvania case may have settled legality, but it sidesteps a more consequential question: whether such identification is even coherent, workable, or safe in practice.
Holly Springs, NC, Mar. 31, 2026 — Much of the public debate around the University of Pennsylvania case has centered on legality. Commentators have focused on whether the government overstepped, whether the subpoena was appropriate, and whether the court reached the right conclusion.
Those questions matter. But they are not the ones that will ultimately determine how this plays out in practice.
There is a more fundamental issue sitting beneath all of it, one that has received remarkably little attention: how, exactly, would anyone determine who is Jewish on a modern university campus? It is the kind of question that sounds simple at first glance, but quickly unravels under closer inspection.
To understand why that question matters, it helps to briefly step back and look at what the case actually involves. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, investigating allegations of antisemitism at Penn, issued a subpoena seeking information that could help identify Jewish faculty and staff who may have experienced or witnessed discrimination. A federal judge ultimately upheld the request, finding it to be a permissible and narrowly tailored part of a civil rights investigation.
That ruling settled the legal question. It did not resolve the practical one.
Identity Is Not a Data Field
Universities are not designed to track religious identity, and in most cases, they do not attempt to do so. Unlike other demographic categories that may appear in institutional datasets, religion is typically absent by design, shaped by both privacy concerns and constitutional boundaries.
There is no standard checkbox for “Jewish” in faculty or student records. No centralized database. No authoritative list that an institution can simply pull off a shelf.
Instead, any attempt to identify Jewish individuals would rely on indirect and incomplete signals. Participation in a Jewish student group might indicate identity, but it might also reflect curiosity, friendship, or cultural interest. Attendance at events tells you even less. Even formal complaints only capture those who choose to come forward, leaving an unknown number outside the frame.
What you are left with is not a dataset, but a patchwork.
The False Precision Problem
That patchwork creates a deeper challenge that is easy to miss. When fragments of information are assembled into a list, the result can appear far more precise than it actually is.
A list drawn from campus organizations will systematically exclude unaffiliated individuals. A list based on complaint records will reflect reporting behavior more than the underlying reality. Event attendance can introduce both false positives and false negatives simultaneously.
Yet once these inputs are combined and formalized, the output takes on the appearance of something complete and authoritative. It looks like a list of people. It behaves like a list of people. But it is not, in any meaningful sense, a reliable representation of the population it claims to describe.
This is how false precision takes hold. The structure suggests accuracy, even when the substance does not support it.
The Fluidity Problem
Complicating matters further is the nature of Jewish identity itself, which does not fit neatly into institutional categories. For some, it is religious and central to daily life. For others, it is cultural, ancestral, or situational. Many move between those expressions over time, or choose to keep their identity private depending on context.
This fluidity is not a flaw. It is a defining characteristic.
But it makes the idea of constructing a fixed list inherently problematic. Any attempt to do so requires drawing boundaries around something that lacks clear edges. Who counts, who does not, and who decides quickly become subjective questions with no stable answers.
Even if a list could be assembled, it would be incomplete the moment it was created and would become increasingly inaccurate over time.
The Incentive Problem
There is also a behavioral layer that changes the equation entirely. Once it becomes known that institutions or the government are attempting to identify members of a specific religious group, people respond in ways that are both rational and difficult to measure.
Some may hesitate to join Jewish organizations. Others may avoid public events or decline to identify themselves in formal processes. Participation, which once reflected community and engagement, becomes filtered through a lens of uncertainty.
Over time, this reshapes the very signals the system depends on. The more visible the effort to identify the group, the less visible the group may become.
In that sense, the act of measurement does not just observe reality. It alters it.
The Precedent Problem
What begins as a narrowly scoped investigation does not stay contained for long. If identifying members of one religious group becomes an accepted practice, it establishes a framework that can be applied elsewhere.
The same logic could be used in investigations involving other religious communities. Each case could be justified on its own merits, tied to legitimate concerns about discrimination or bias.
But taken together, they point toward a broader shift. Religious identity, long treated as something outside institutional tracking, becomes something that can be requested, assembled, and analyzed when circumstances warrant it.
That is not a small change. It is a structural one.
The Analytical Illusion
Once a list exists, even an imperfect one, it creates a powerful incentive to use it. Analysts will look for patterns. Policymakers will draw conclusions. Institutions will make decisions based on what appears to be concrete information.
But if the underlying data is fragmented and inconsistently defined, those conclusions will rest on unstable ground. The analysis may be rigorous. The models may be sophisticated. The outputs may look convincing.
None of that changes the quality of the inputs.
This is how systems produce answers that feel precise and actionable, even when they are built on incomplete representations of reality.
What the Court Didn’t Resolve
The court addressed the legal question and concluded that the government’s request was permissible and appropriately limited in scope. That resolves one dimension of the case, but it leaves others untouched.
It does not answer whether such identification is feasible in any meaningful sense. It does not address whether the resulting information would be reliable. And it does not grapple with the downstream effects of attempting to construct such a list in the first place.
Those questions lie outside the ruling's boundaries, but they are central to understanding what happens next.
Why This Matters More Than It Seems
At first glance, this may appear to be a technical issue, the kind of operational detail that sits behind larger policy debates. In reality, it goes to the heart of how institutions understand and categorize the people within them.
If religious identity cannot be reliably captured, then any system built around identifying it will carry inherent limitations. Those limitations do not stay confined to the data. They extend into the decisions, policies, and narratives that follow.
This is not just about one investigation. It is about whether the framework itself holds.
Bottom Line
Before debating whether the government should have access to a list of Jewish individuals, a more basic question needs to be confronted.
Can such a list exist in a way that is accurate, meaningful, and responsible?
If the answer is uncertain, then the conversation is incomplete. And if the question remains unasked, the implications may not become clear until much later, when decisions have already been made based on information that was never as solid as it appeared.
About the Author
Christian A. Hendricks is the publisher and founder of Holly Springs Update, a local news publication covering Holly Springs, NC, and its surrounding area. From time to time, he shares his views on national, regional, and state issues. He can be reached via email at christian.hendricks@hollyspringsupdate.com.