(RNS) — Timothy Snyder, a historian of the Holocaust and Eastern European tyranny, has a tip for dealing with authoritarianism: “Don’t obey in advance.” 

So, when the university that granted me my doctorate and educated four generations of my family was asked by the Trump administration in July for lists of Jewish faculty members, I held my breath. Would I be able to continue to be proud of the University of Pennsylvania, the place I learned so much from?

In the past year, universities have varied widely in their responses to demands from the Trump administration to fall into line on ridding their campuses of wokeness and antisemitism. Columbia University (my undergraduate alma mater) settled with the administration, paying $21 million in return for restoring its federal research grants. It’s hard to see how cutting basic science research will help reduce antisemitism. It will likely only cause Jews’ presence at a university to be seen as somehow disruptive. (See the recent arguments that women ruined the workplace.)

Other universities have variously complied with administration demands or resisted, but a few, such as Barnard College of Columbia University and the University of California, Berkeley, acquiesced and shared personal cellphone numbers of Jewish faculty. (Penn refused, and is now being sued by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission). Nara Milanich, a Barnard history professor, said it reminded her of 1930s Italy, when lists of Jews were put together by the local government. “We’ve seen this movie before, and it ends with yellow stars,” she said.

It also troubled Milanich that the government appeared to be “fishing” for reports of antisemitism: According to the Forward, the University of California, Berkeley said it had provided the names of 160 individuals involved in cases of antisemitism. “Evidently, they don’t have sufficient people to file lawsuits, so they have to go shake the trees to find people?” said Milanich.

Lists of Jews are never a good thing. Amanda Shanor, a professor at the Wharton School and Penn’s law school, told The Daily Pennsylvanian, the student newspaper: “The history of government demands for lists of Jewish people is one of the most terrifying in world history. I hope that students, faculty, and staff — Jewish and non-Jewish alike — will tell their family and friends about the government’s demand for a list of Penn’s Jews.”

Another Penn professor, Sigal Ben-Porath, wrote, “In 1941, the Dutch government had the Jews register as such — and this is how Nazis found many of my family members.”

On a trip to Amsterdam’s Holocaust museum in March with my college-age daughter, I saw firsthand the effects of those lists — the thick book containing the names of over 100,000 Dutch Jews who perished during World War II, along with a memorial to them. In front of our hotel was another list of sorts — a Stolpersteine, a marker of the names, birth and death dates of four Jews who had lived in the building where we were then staying. It was awful to imagine those who had been alive where we were, taken off to camps to die.

We toured the hiding place, the secret annex, of Anne Frank and her family, where they were betrayed at the very end of the war, sent on the very last convoy to Auschwitz, so tragically close to survival.

I later learned from Dina Kraft’s excellent book on the life of Frank’s friend Hannah Pick-Goslar, “My Friend Anne Frank,” who did survive the war, that Anne’s father, Otto Frank, had twice applied to go to the United States. The first time they were denied, the Franks left Germany for what they hoped was the relative safety of the Netherlands. The second time, despite being sponsored by Nathan Straus, whose family owned Macy’s and other stores, they were again turned down by U.S. immigration authorities, as Pamela Nadell recounts in her new history of antisemitism in America. Just one member of the family, Otto, survived.

But the same day we saw the secret annex, we saw the Dutch Resistance Museum, which chronicles the many acts of resistance in the Netherlands by individuals and groups, including ministers and journalists. One diorama in the exhibit is dedicated to a man who blew up the government building that housed the country’s citizenship records, making it easier to forge documents credibly, as there were no longer any originals to compare them to. A map of Jewish neighborhoods was accompanied by letters of family members arguing over whether to register with the agency that made the maps.

“Don’t obey in advance,” I thought to myself silently. They could have hidden and lived had the authorities not known where to find them. 

The day we visited the museum was the eve of the Jewish holiday of Purim, on which Jews fast to commemorate the fast of Esther, related in the Bible’s Book of Esther. Purim is a holiday of human action against oppression and mass slaughter. Esther gathered the Jews to pray and fast and they were able to combat their foes — and succeed. This is why resistance — and Purim — is an “enduring obligation,” in the words of professor Wendy Zierler. According to Maimonides’ Laws of the Megillah, “All the books of the Prophets and all the Writings will be annulled in the days of the Messiah, apart from Megillat Esther.”

Ben-Porath, the Penn professor, whose family hails from the Netherlands, wrote: “In 1941, the Dutch government had the Jews register as such — and this is how Nazis found many of my family members. Jews at Penn and beyond have diverse views on politics, and on the efforts to fight antisemitism; I do think we are united in our strong opposition to being put on a list.”

Human resistance — by printing brochures and letters of opposition, hiding those who are being sought or not turning over lists — has been possible in the past, as the Dutch Resistance Museum documented, and for all time. It should be now as well. No university should be making lists of faculty members of certain religions if the university cares about the well-being of the faculty and their families.

(Beth Kissileff is co-editor of “Bound in the Bond of Life: Pittsburgh Writers Reflect on the Tree of Life Tragedy.” The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of RNS.)