Opinion

The Jews of Easy Company

By Jim Nathanson

Ed Shames died Dec. 3. He was 99 years old, the last surviving officer of Easy Company, the World War II combat unit (E Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne Division) made famous by Stephen Ambrose’s 1992 book Band of Brothers and the 2001 HBO miniseries of the same name.

Shames jumped behind enemy lines with the 101st on D-Day, receiving the regiment’s first battlefield commission a week later. His company commander also recommended him for the army’s Distinguished Service Cross for bravery under fire.

He fought in all of the 101st major engagements, including a second combat jump during the ill-fated Market Garden campaign where he served as a frontline intelligence officer, making at least one foray behind enemy lines in civilian clothing, before taking command of Easy Company’s 3rd Platoon in October 1944. Shames volunteered for Operation Pegasus, a daring mission that rescued 138 allied soldiers trapped behind enemy lines, and was part of the defense of Bastogne during the bitter monthlong Battle of the Bulge. Shames was with Easy Company when it took Hitler’s fabled mountain retreat, Eagle’s Nest, and he was one of the first members of the 101st to enter Dachau shortly after it was liberated. At war’s end, his combat record earned him a bronze star.

Based on his performance as an intelligence officer and a combat leader, he was recruited by one of our nation’s intelligence services, where he worked for the next 30 years.

Ed Shames was Jewish — a practicing Jew. According to his obituary in the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, “He served cognac he had liberated from Eagle’s Nest at his son’s Bar Mitzvah. The bottle was labeled ‘for the Führer’s use only!’”

However, one would never realize Shames was Jewish by reading Ambrose’s book. He is referenced a number of times but his religious affiliation goes unnoted.

This omission becomes significant only because of the way Ambrose treats other Easy Company Jews.

The villain of the story, the most hated officer in Easy Company, was a Jew, Capt. Herbert Sobel, the man who led Easy Company throughout its stateside training.

Here is how Ambrose describes him:

“(He was) fairly tall, slim in build... His eyes were slits, his nose large and hooked...He had been a clothing salesman and knew nothing of the out-ofdoors. He was ungainly, uncoordinated, in no way athletic. Every man in the company was in better physical condition. His mannerisms were ‘funny,’ he ‘talked different.’ He exuded arrogance. Behind his back, men cursed him, ‘f… ing Jew’ being the most common epithet.”

He was criticized most for his harsh training methods. But what goes unnoticed by Ambrose is that Sobel truly led the men throughout their training. If they went on a brutal hike without sleep, Sobel led them. If they were forced to run with full packs up and down the infamous Mt. Currahee located near their primary training base, Sobel led them. Only well after the war did some of the men acknowledge that Sobel had made Easy Company. They were the tough, well-trained outfit they were largely because of Capt. Herbert Sobel.

The fact that they hated him is no surprise; he was uncompromisingly tough on them and, yes, probably more than a bit of a jerk. Soldiers almost always hate their drill instructors. That they were antisemitic in their attacks on him is also not surprising; after all, most were rural or small-town gentiles. Sobel could well have been the first Jew most of them had ever known. One can forgive the men of Easy Company for how they reacted to Sobel. What one needs to ask is why Ambrose, in writing Easy’s story, didn’t make those connections.

After all, Sobel had earned his paratroop wings just as they had. While he lost command of Easy Company, he did jump with the 101st in the early morning hours of June 6 and fought in many of the same battles as did Easy Company, earning, like Shames, a bronze star in the process. After the war he entered the reserves, was called up during the Korean conflict, and retired with the rank of lieutenant colonel.

Ambrose even casts a horrible tragedy in Sobel’s life in the worst possible light. In 1970, he tried to kill himself with a pistol shot to his head. Ambrose writes he “bungled” his own suicide. The bullet entered his temple, severed both optic nerves and exited through the opposite side of his head. Somehow, he survived. An unsuccessful attempt, yes, but a “bungled” attempt — well, that leaves a whole different impression.

The only other Jew noted by Ambrose was a private named Joseph

Liebgott. A good soldier, he was said to be one of the funniest guys in Easy, except when it came to financial matters. Sound familiar? And, as reported by Ambrose, Liebgott was one of the very few Jews in Easy Company — no mention of Ed Shames. Actually, unknown to Ambrose, Liebgott wasn’t even Jewish. He was a Catholic though his mother may have been Jewish. Ambrose may have also erred in his description of Sobel’s physical abilities. He writes that Sobel could barely complete 30 pushups with “arms trembling,” yet his son reports that his dad regularly did 50 or more pushups every evening with little or no effort. Ambrose also claims, as quoted above, that Sobel was in no way athletic, yet his son points out he was on his high school’s swim team where he did quite well . While Ambrose’s writing is blind to its antisemitic elements, I think there is a broader issue at play here. In many ways, how Ambrose and the men of Easy Company thought of Sobel simply fits the stereotype of the weak Jew that so many, Jews included, cling Paul Morigi/Getty Images to even today. He was “unathletic,” “physically weak,” and “uncoordinated,” In a phrase, not fit to be a combat officer. Ed Shames, fitting less the stereotype, his Jewishness goes unnoticed. Over the last few years, I’ve given talks at Beth Abraham Synagogue that focused on Jewish physicality. The first, Mobsters and Athletes, discussed an unbelievable outburst of Jewish physicality on both sides of the law during the first half of the 20th century, especially in the years between the two world wars. The emergence, if you will, Ed Shames, the last surviving of tough Jews. officer and oldest surviving member of Easy Company The second talk tried to explain why Jewish physicality comes as such a surprise to both Jew and non-Jew alike. I traced it back to the earliest years of rabbinic Judaism and the reaction of the rabbis to the horrific losses suffered in the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132-136 C.E. Fearing that further armed resistance to outside rule could lead to the destruction of the Jewish people, they set out quite deliberately to “defang” what it meant to be Jewish — a process accelerated by the emergence of rabid antisemitism in Europe and the Arab world in the centuries that followed. The consequence of early rabbinic intention and antisemitism was a Judaism that was inward looking and rejected much of the secular world and a Jewish culture that valued learning over physicality. This view is succinctly summed up in the advice Rabbi Yitchak Rasofsky of Chicago gave his son, Beryl Rasofsky in the early 1920s: Jews do not resort to violence, he said, “let the (goyim) be the fighters…we are the scholars.” Beryl Rasofsky, by the way, didn’t listen to his father’s advice. Also known

Continued on Page 17 Nonviolent resistance

In Texas, hostages were taken inside a synagogue. The following Monday was Martin Luther King Jr. Day. I studied literature in college and currently I study law, perhaps because I have never believed in coincidences. Only important details.

The Rev. Martin Luther King’s children Bernice King and Martin Luther King III have called to halt the formal celebration of their father’s namesake holiday until voting rights legislation is passed.

We are living in a pivotal moment. When I say we, I do mean we literally, unlike the preamble’s opening, “We the People.” The men spilling that ink were also drinking warm beer in the high heat of summer and trying to start a nation. Many of them also owned slaves.

Rev. King’s message of nonviolent resistance was clear when he wrote from a Birmingham jail cell in 1963. This letter to the clergymen of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference discussed unsolved bombings of Alabama churches with Black congregants and the methodology and spiritual significance of nonviolent protest. King’s fellow clergymen in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference criticized his decision to conduct nonviolent protests in Birmingham — a risk that landed him in jail. Rev. King replied, “I am in Birmingham because injustice is here.”

The brutality Rev. King protested in Birmingham happened in the streets, it happened in court houses, in voting booths, and in shops displaying signs designed to humiliate and intimidate. He combatted this vitriol with self purification, resilience, and careful identification of systemic oppression and its widespread impact on his community. He wrote, “there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth.”

Rev. King was a Baptist minister and president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. His message of nonviolence and justice knows no creed.

As Jews, we are renegades and wanderers through the desert. Some call this juxtaposition cognitive dissonance. Others call it faith. Our story of Exodus and oppression is not singular. Our joy, together, is an act of nonviolent resistance.

I know where the corners of my field are. The fruit there belongs to the wanderer and the stranger.

— Claire Gaglione, Cincinnati