Remembering A Crusading Journalist: Sidney Zion

by Gary Rosenblatt
Editor And Publisher

Sidney Zion, the larger-than-life journalist who died last week at the age of 75, caused a highly embarrassing moment for me some years ago, but I still smile in recalling it.

To first set the scene, keep in mind that Sidney was the epitome of the old school, “Get me rewrite, sweetheart” reporter: loud, opinionated, gruff, cigar-chomping, drink-in-hand, fedora-wearing and impatient. Also, smart, well informed, thoughtful, a great storyteller and, deep down, a tender spirit who ranked on but loved his fellow Jews more than anything.

I was a huge admirer of Sidney, his no-holds-barred writing and passionate approach to life, and he was one of the first people I approached to write for The Jewish Week when I came to the paper

16 years ago.

He agreed, and wrote a monthly column for us in those early days. It was during that time that he insisted we meet for drinks at the bar at the Yale Club (his alma mater) one summer evening. When we walked in together, the room was crowded and noisy, but everyone stopped to greet Sidney heartily, and he responded in kind. (A real-life version of Norm making his entrance in “Cheers.”)

With his arm around my shoulders, Sidney marched me to the bar and announced, “The usual for me,” before turning to me and asking, “What’ll it be?”

When I meekly replied, “a ginger ale,” he looked at me incredulously a moment before bellowing, “a ginger ale? And you call yourself a journalist?”

There was silence for a moment before the room filled with laughter.

But I had learned to accept Sidney as a colorful maverick who pulled no punches (though he no doubt threw a few), and I enjoyed just being around him.

We first met almost 25 years ago when, after reading and being deeply impressed with the range and style of a newly published collection of his columns and essays called “Read All About It! The Collected Adventures of a Maverick Reporter,” I called Sidney and asked if we could meet. He graciously accepted, and I took the train up from Baltimore (where I was editing the Baltimore Jewish Times) to spend a long afternoon with him in his Upper West Side apartment. Ostensibly, I interviewed him, but more precisely I listened to him hold court on a wide variety of issues, from his affection for underdogs — like Revisionist heroes Ben Hecht and Peter Bergson, Israeli “tough guys” Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon, and Jewish gangsters (especially Meyer Lansky) — to his corresponding contempt for the Establishment, including Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Supreme Court and American Jewish defense organizations.
Only a few months before we met, Sidney’s 18-year-old daughter, Libby, died during an emergency room visit to New York Hospital, and he had already begun a relentless legal battle that lasted years and resulted in sweeping reforms regarding hospital resident working conditions. It was that chapter of his life that headlined the obits for Sidney in the local papers last week, but I think he would have preferred being remembered equally for the enterprising reporting he did throughout his long career, especially when it came to defending Israel and needling American Jews about what he consider their enduring inferiority complex about being accepted.

“They’re so shreklich, so afraid,” he told me. “That fear in them is always there. Always. It’s terrible. They worry about anti-Semitism. They worry about what the goyim will think of them. Maybe Jews really believe they’re not as good as the next guy. But I sure as hell don’t feel that way. Jews shouldn’t be scared anymore. Never scared. They should be mad.”

Sidney was mad about so many things, but that’s because he believed in the pursuit of the truth and had no tolerance for those who compromised.

In a remarkable journalism career that didn’t start until he was 29 (having first been a trial lawyer and assistant U.S. attorney for New Jersey), he was a fixture here, working for The New York Times, Daily News, New York Post and New York Magazine. It was Sidney who in 1971 revealed that Daniel Ellsberg, a hero to those who opposed the Vietnam War, was the source of the leak of the Pentagon Papers, making Sidney an outcast to the press. But he dismissed angry colleagues as jealous hypocrites and insisted he was only doing his job, shedding light on a hot story.

Among his most memorable pieces were a lengthy 1979 critique of the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Burger, a 20,000-word, behind-the-scenes story in 1978 on the Camp David peace accords (both written for the New York Times Magazine) and a 1983 “political obit” of Menachem Begin in Harper’s, which appeared shortly before the prime minister resigned. That piece was a tribute to Begin as a microcosm of the Jew in the 20th century, an outcast, but, above all, a survivor.
Like Sidney.

He was a source of support when I came to this newspaper, warning me not to let vocal critics sway my instincts on what to cover. And he was there when I called on him, like the time I asked him to speak to a journalism class I was teaching at Stern College for Women some years ago. I’ll never forget the look on some of the students’ faces when Sidney told a few of his stories about encounters with the likes of Izzy Schwarzberg, a gangster Sidney had known well, not bothering to censor his colorful language.
“Did I scare the hell out of ‘em?” he later asked in his raspy voice.

For all his toughness, Sidney was a family man and shul-goer, and I would see him from time to time at weekday services, saying Kaddish for his wife, Elsa, who died in 2005.

The novelist E.L. Doctorow said it best when he once praised Sidney for having “a brassy confidence in his instinct for truth, a zest for scoundrels and a happy ability to go everywhere and talk to anyone.”
I am saddened by Sidney’s death, but comforted in reading his son Jed’s comment that his father lived “better than anyone I know” and “never did anything he didn’t want to do.

“It’s sad,” he said, speaking for himself and his brother, Adam. “But he had a damn good run.”
Indeed he did, and I raise my glass (of ginger ale) to one of my heroes, an authentic crusader the likes of whom we may never see again.

E-mail: Gary@jewishweek.org

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