By Marc Liebman, Captain (USN retired)
During their military careers, many Jews who served in the U.S. military have encountered anti-semitism. It is not a new phenomenon. Way back in the early 1800s, Uriah P. Levy forced the U.S. Navy to hold court-martials six times to expose anti-semitic officers. Each time, Levy won, and the anti-semitic officers were disciplined and/or forced out of the Navy. Levy, the first American Jew to reach flag rank, set a standard for not tolerating anti-semitism in the U.S. Armed Forces.
Unfortunately, anti-semitism still exists in the U.S. military. It is a form of discrimination that is prohibited as per Article 132 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The article also makes retaliation against individuals based on race, sex, religion, or national origin a crime.
There is a difference between ignorance and anti-semitism. Individuals who have never been around Jews may not know our customs or much about our religion. As such, they may make statements due to a lack of knowledge or experience that, on the surface, are offensive but are not meant that way.
In 1968, my first BOQ suitemate in flight training in Pensacola came from a tiny town in Mississippi. The morning we met, he said he was going to the Chevy dealer to “Jew them down on the price for a used Corvette.” I let the first time he used it pass. After three more uses of the words “Jew them down” as a substitute for negotiating, I explained that I was Jewish. While that may be acceptable language in his hometown, it wasn’t around me. It led to a profuse apology and a nice dinner with him, and he never used the term again.
This was an instance of ignorance, not anti-semitism, and is far different than those who espouse anti-semitic views or deny the Holocaust ever happened. The message is that you must filter what is said in jest or ignorance with what is a true feeling or action.
The foregoing vignette asks, “When one encounters anti-semitism, what do you do?” The answer is different for each rank and each situation.
As a member of the U.S. military, you should deal with it, or the prejudice will fester. Anti-semites are bullies and will keep picking on you until you fight back. There are ways to fight back. Getting into a brawl is not one unless he/she attacks you first AND you have witnesses who will testify on your behalf. Even then, a fight risks non-judicial punishment or worse, a court martial.
Unfortunately, the more junior you are, the harder it is to fight back. Most vulnerable are men and women in basic training, cadets and midshipmen at the service academies and officer candidate schools, followed by those who are E-6 and below.
These men and women do have options. Step one is if there were witnesses, to speak privately with them to get their commitment to testify on your behalf and what they just saw and heard on “paper.” You do the same.
Write the note objectively from the perspective of how it impacted you professionally. Anti-semitic acts are insults, but try not to let emotions color what you document. Later, if the individual commits an anti-semitic act again, now you have a pattern. This immediately moves it from “he said/she said” to evidence to support your contention that an anti-semitic act had occurred.
If no one has witnessed the comment or action, take the individual aside and have a private conversation with him or her. If you don’t receive an apology and an understanding that the individual will cease his anti-semitic behavior, you must decide where to go next.
There are two choices. One is the ship’s or base chaplain, who can go well above you in the chain of command. This option is available to all ranks! Organizations such as Aleph Institute, which has access to rabbis who have served on active duty, can provide resources/advice based on what happened.
The best option is your immediate supervisor. If he/she is the anti-semite, then you need to go higher in your chain of command. This can be dicey and depends on the unit. If there are both formal and informal relationships between officers and enlisted, you can go to an officer you know and trust for advice and even help on what to do next.
Your unit supervisor and his superior will want to keep it contained within their span of control. In other words, they may tell the two of you to make nice to each other.
Understand that if you raise the anti-semitic flag when it is not justified, it will adversely affect your relationship with your fellow soldiers and shipmates, to say nothing of those above you in the chain of command.
Type of Unit Makes a Difference
Much depends on the type of unit you are in. Destroyers, cruisers, aviation squadrons, infantry and tank companies and special forces units are relatively small and have informal officer/enlisted relationships one can leverage in cases of anti-semitism.
My background is as a combat search and rescue helicopter pilot in which we flew with two or three enlisted aircrewmen. Most of the time, we operated in small detachments ranging from two officers, one helicopter, and 12-15 enlisted to larger detachments with three helicopters, eight officers, and about 50 enlisted. The formally/informal relationships among aircrews provide an interesting option.
For example, I was the maintenance officer in a three helicopter, 50-man detachment deployed to the Mediterranean.
One of our aircrewman who I did not know was Jewish came to me with a very ugly, anti-semitic story. I was an O-3 at the time, and he was an E-4. After speaking with two other members of the detachment who witnessed the incident, we went to the detachment officer-in-charge (OinC). The anti-semite’s (an E-6 hoping to make E-7) actions and words were worthy of at least non-judicial punishment, but the OinC decided to write an unsatisfactory special performance evaluation and have the man sent home.
What You Do Depends on You and the Situation
When one encounters anti-semitism, it is your call on what to do next. There is no hard and fast rule on what to do other than you should not let it stand. There’s no place for anti-semitism in the U.S. military.
Many E-6s and below and service academy cadets and midshipmen are afraid of retaliation by the anti-semite which is a risk anyone speaking out about anti-semitism faces. How it may occur depends on who made the anti-semitic comment.
Suppose the anti-semitic individual is your direct supervisor, and you push back. In that case, he/she may play nice until it comes time to write your annual performance evaluation. This is when the anti-semite can try to affect your career by downgrading your marks and/or ranking against your peers.
Another form of retaliation is when you are given a or a series of tasks that you are either not trained to do or that would require several others to perform and/or unrealistic deadlines. In either case, the anti-semite is setting you up for failure.
Again, the basis for fighting this type of passive-aggressive behavior is documenting the event with facts, not emotions. If there are witnesses, get their statements, but you are the one who must decide if you want to escalate.
As You Rise in Rank, You Have More Options
As an officer, the game changes because there are informal relationships among the officers and senior enlisted (E-7 and above) that can be leveraged to navigate within and around the chain of command. To do so requires facts, evidence/proof, and tact.
Anytime one accuses someone of anti-semitism, it cannot be seen as whining. Understand, if the issue is not handled within the unit, you are, whatever your rank, playing with the Commanding Officer’s career. The last thing the CO wants to happen is one of his men being investigated, or worse, charged and tried in a court martial.
When I was a very senior O-3, I was in a squadron in which the senior watch officer—the man who wrote the monthly squadron duty office (SDO) schedule—was an O-4 and the squadron’s administration (admin) officer. With the High Holidays approaching over a month away, as per the current Navy instruction, I handed him a formal note asking not to be assigned as the SDO on either Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur well before he made the SDO assignments. In the note, I volunteered to stand the duty on Christmas Day and Easter Sunday. The September watch bill came out, and I was assigned to stand the 24-hour watch for both days. This is against DOD policy unless the unit is engaged in active combat.
When I asked the admin officer if I could swap duty days with other officers, he ordered me not to switch my SDO assignments in front of a very junior co-pilot. I was, to put it mildly, furious.
I did two things. First, I asked the O-2 to write down what he saw and heard. Separately, I did the same. The next day, I was scheduled to fly with the squadron commanding officer. At the time, I was the squadron’s aircrew training officer responsible for our 30+ aircrewmen and one of the squadron’s most experienced aircraft commanders.
After our debrief, the squadron CO asked me when our most junior aircrewmen would be fully qualified. After answering, he asked me an open-ended question about what I thought about what the squadron can do to improve their training and readiness. Readiness can be affected by anti-semitism, so I told him what the admin/senior watch officer said and did and added that many of the aircrewmen didn’t want to fly with the admin officer. The CO’s eyes narrowed and his only words to me were, “Don’t do anything, I’ll take care of it.”
The next day, in front of the legal officer and executive officer, he grilled the O-2 first, then me. The young O-2 who supported my story added several instances when he observed unprofessional behavior by the admin officer. He then spoke with the senior air crewman who did not mince words about the admin officer. Two days later, the senior watch officer who had about 15 years of service resigned his commission in the Navy.
Why? The CO informed him that he was writing a special fitness report that documented his unprofessional behavior and he would be dead last in the annual ranking of O-4s. To a promotion board, this would be a signal not to promote the man.
It Doesn’t Get Easier When You Become More Senior
Anti-semitism is anti-semitism, and it doesn’t matter who exhibits anti-semitic behavior. In the Navy, once you make O-5 and even more so, O-6, subordinates are very careful what they say to you, informally or formally. As a detachment OinC, or ship or squadron commanding officer, you sign your enlisted men’s annual evaluations and your officers’ annual fitness reports. These documents affect each service member’s career.
During my 26-year career, I was a detachment OinC three times—two as an O-3, once as an O-4—and a commanding officer twice, once each as an O-5 and an O-6.
As a senior officer and/or commanding officer, you must set an example with actions when discriminatory behavior occurs. Actions that send a clear and unambiguous message that discriminatory behavior of any kind will not be tolerated will either drive the anti-semites underground or, more than likely, encourage members of your command to expose them.
It is up to you as the CO or OinC to ensure that those subordinate to you can come to you through the proper means with examples of anti-semitism. As a leader, make sure that those under you know that you “don’t shoot messengers” and that “bad news doesn’t get better with age.” If your actions follow another saying, “What you do speaks so loudly, no one can hear what you are saying,” you can help stamp out anti-semitism.
Marc Liebman is a retired Navy Captain and Naval Aviator who as a helicopter pilot, flew combat search and rescue and special operations missions. He is a combat veteran of Vietnam and Desert Shield/Storm spent 26 years in the Navy. Today, he is an award-winning author with 14 books, all of whom have Jewish Naval officers as the main character. In each novel, the character must deal with some aspect of anti-semitism.
Originally published in the Pesach 5784 issue of The Jewish American Warrior.
