When Phil Perlmutter objected to something I’d written, he was quick to tell me.

The phone would ring, and when I answered it, he wasted no time on introductory pleasantries. In his unmistakable voice, pure Brooklyn gravel, he would growl: “Jeff, are you out of your mind?”

When it came from Perlmutter, who headed the Jewish Community Relations Council in Boston for 15 years, criticism was as welcome as praise. Whatever issues we might have differed on, there was never any danger of our disagreement becoming personal. While he was never shy about saying what was on his mind, he was equally curious to understand what was on mine — especially if we were at odds.

I have been thinking about my old friend, who died in 2013, ever since the US Naval Academy library, apparently under orders from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, purged 381 books, most of them about race, gender, or prejudice. One of those books is “Legacy of Hate: A Short History of Ethnic, Religious, and Racial Prejudice in America,” which Perlmutter wrote after retiring in 1990.

“A wide array of books on race and gender were targeted,” the Associated Press reported, “dealing with such topics as African American women poets, entertainers who wore blackface, and the treatment of women in Islamic countries. Also on the list were historical books on racism, the Ku Klux Klan, and the treatment of women, gender, and race in art and literature.”

According to the Pentagon, the books were removed to comply with the Trump administration’s drive to uproot diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, policies within the federal government. The White House in January directed the military academies to “eliminate radical DEI and gender ideologies” from their instruction, though the order said nothing about removing books from libraries.

To be sure, many of the titles on the purge list — such as “How to Be An Antiracist” by Ibram X. Kendi, “White Fragility” by Robin DiAngelo, and “Gender Queer” by Maia Kobabe — reflect a left-wing, “woke” ideology. But the list also includes Maya Angelou’s acclaimed autobiography, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”; Matthew Delmont’s “Half American,” an award-winning history of Black military heroism during World War II; and a bestseller about a racehorse by the novelist Geraldine Brooks, a former Wall Street Journal correspondent.

To anyone who knew Perlmutter, the idea that his book would be culled because of DEI radicalism is preposterous. He was an outspoken opponent of affirmative action and conventional lefty thinking, sometimes to the consternation of his more politically correct colleagues.

Again and again in his writing, he condemned group preferences, quotas, set-asides, and diversity policies that involved discrimination for the sake of racial balance. He scorned what he called the “super-inflated, double-standard morality” of liberals who championed affirmative action policies in schools and workplaces but made sure it wouldn’t affect their own prospects. A key theme of his book on the history of prejudice is that virtually every group was discriminated against at some point.

Well before the first Europeans arrived in the New World, he pointed out, some American Indian tribes engaged in slavery and mass murder. And while he deplored the long and varied history of intolerance in the United States, he deplored even more those who refused to acknowledge the nation’s extraordinary record of progress.

“Underlying all my thoughts,” he declared in the preface to the second edition of his book, “is a conviction that whatever America’s shortcomings, it is the least bigoted country in the world.”

Whoever decided that Perlmutter’s book could no longer appear on the shelves of the Naval Academy library obviously knew nothing about its contents or its author. I don’t know if my late friend would have supported Trump, but he would undoubtedly have supported the administration’s professed goal of ending group preferences and judging people on the basis of merit and personal achievement.

On the other hand, Perlmutter — who dropped out of high school to join the Army and fight in World War II — would have been appalled at the notion that American soldiers and sailors are such delicate snowflakes that they must be shielded from access to books about race and gender. Libraries, especially university libraries, are supposed to encompass a wide array of topics, outlooks, and messages. The Naval Academy’s Nimitz Library in Annapolis is gigantic: It comprises nearly 600,000 printed books. In a library so vast, nothing that might contribute to the education of a future officer — from “The Communist Manifesto” to “Mein Kampf” — should be off limits.

Censorship and book bans will not build a stronger Navy, nor will they produce better leaders. If intellectual freedom should be nonnegotiable anywhere, surely it is in a great public library. Phil Perlmutter would have been appalled by the book purge in Annapolis, and if he could call to talk about it, I know just what he would say: “Are they out of their minds?”