I am a Jew. I recently celebrated the Passover holiday, commemorating the deliverance of my people from slavery to freedom. Yet at numerous times in history since our deliverance from the Egyptians, we Jews have been anything but free.

I am descended from a people who have been denied free speech and freedom of religion. We have been persecuted and murdered in the millions for pursuing the same. The message of Passover is that having known the bitterness of this oppression ourselves, we Jews must recognize and are obligated to fight oppression wherever and whenever it may raise its ugly specter.

This is the very reason why I believe deporting students who exercise their First Amendment rights is not only unconstitutional, it is antisemitic. It is oppressing individuals by suppressing their constitutional freedoms, ironically and erroneously in the name of combating antisemitism.

But let’s be crystal clear: having been denied these rights ourselves, Jews must see abrogation of free speech rights of any group or individual in the same vein as having those freedoms denied to each of us. I see the faces of Jews ripped from their homes by the Gestapo in the terrified face of the young Tufts University student accosted on the street by unidentified ICE officers. As due process was withheld from us in Hitler’s Germany, we cannot abide circumventing due process for anyone.

What is done to one, is done to all.

 Moreover, claiming unlawfulness as an exercise on behalf of the Jewish people brands us as “the problem” once again. The danger is that, as in Hitler’s Germany, this will be extrapolated to mean that America’s democratic system is at risk because of the Jewish people.

There is enough real antisemitism and historical precedence to go around without pinning on us the deportation of people who are speaking their conscience with no evidence of criminal wrongdoing and without due process.

Protest and free speech are guaranteed to anyone and everyone on United States soil. My father was a Jewish attorney who, as a manyfold decorated WW II bomber pilot, risked his life to protect those freedoms. From my youngest recollection he instilled in me the belief that despite its flaws and those of its authors, the U.S. Constitution was without peer in modern government frameworks.

 So many years later I still hold that belief. As a Jew, I receive it as the deepest insult and injustice, that defiance of our Constitution, that denial of First Amendment rights, that persecution of people because of their beliefs, should be declared to have been carried out in my name; in the name of the Jewish people.

Combating antisemitism? Bah, humbug! No, not a war on antisemitism by any means. Deporting students for speaking their personal truths is the same war on free speech and withholding of due process we Jews have experienced time and time again. It is the petri dish in which antisemitism flourishes.

Never, never, in my name.

Deborah Howland-Murray lives in Bridgeport.