Let’s stipulate that among the pro-Palestinian demonstrators on college campuses protesting Israel’s devastating assault on Gaza in retaliation for the Oct. 7, 2023, atrocities by Hamas there were and are individuals who conflate Zionism and Judaism, or Zionists and Jews, and hate both. Let’s also be clear that some criticism of Israeli government policy, including by heterodox Jews like me, is rooted in Jewish values of justice and moral conduct — and as Americans in our anguish and anger at our country’s blank check for the Israeli military to use our money and U.S.-supplied bombs to kill, maim and displace hundreds of thousands of civilians.

It wasn’t so long ago that minority students on some U.S. college campuses demanded “safe spaces” to hang with their fellow Blacks, Latinos, Asians, queers or other identity groups and to be protected from “microaggressions,” racism or just the cluelessness of straight white people. Jews are another minority, with an independently founded and funded campus organization, Hillel, that provides networks and meeting spaces to accommodate their religious or cultural affinities — including, according to a recent New York Times story, a diverse range of views on the Gaza war.

Why some minorities should be more, or less, equal than others, or more protected from aggression — micro or macro — is an important question for educators, institutions and identity-centered students to ask themselves. A corollary is the question of why some minorities, like Jews, should be targets for harassment that would not be tolerated if aimed overtly at, say, Black students.

So it’s easy to see why the Trump administration, even as it tries to eradicate diversity everywhere, would use Jews to advance its attack on the First Amendment: If you speak out for Palestinian rights, you are branded an antisemite or Hamas-supporter and may be snatched off the street by the secret police (rhymes with ICE), detained without due process and deported, or labeled a gang member and disappeared to a foreign prison. Phony philosemitism is being deployed as a cover for free-speech suppression: We’re doing it to protect the Jews! No longer mere scapegoats, Jews are now the model minority, perfect victims, props and tools in the totalitarian strategy of shutting down any form of opposition.

If that sounds like antisemitism, that’s because it is. In American culture Jews have proved that we can take care of ourselves. We are certainly less vulnerable to racist, sexist, xenophobic or homophobic attacks than many other minorities. If I were Muslim, Asian, Latino, Black, female, gay or trans — or an immigrant from anywhere, of any status, legal or illegal — I would be a lot more worried about my safety in the reactionary, misogynistic, autocratic, white-supremacist, macho climate created by the current regime than I am as a Jew, or even as a journalist — although the independent press has long been a target of Trumpist vilification; we are, after all, “enemies of the people,” and they will be coming for us soon enough.

The president has made no secret of his admiration for dictators, his intention to rule indefinitely and his effort to dominate every aspect of our political, cultural, legal, academic, fiscal and communal lives. As a free-speech advocate, a journalist and a Jewish American, all I ask of the government is to be left alone — not specially protected, not muzzled by any form of political orthodoxy or language policing, and not to have my ethnicity exploited as a means of silencing dissent.

An Israeli acquaintance of mine living here told me about a supermarket clerk who overheard her and her husband speaking Hebrew at the checkout stand and asked what language they were speaking and where they were from. When told they were Israeli, the cashier said, “I love Jews.” My Israeli acquaintance remarked that that was about the most antisemitic thing she’d ever heard.

Stephen Kessler’s column appears on Saturdays.