Noted.

ZION-ISM: Some years ago Sidney Zion, our friend and sometime contributor but mostly critic (usually about matters related to Israel), who died on August 2 at age 75, wrote for The Nation an obituary of the country's leading obituarist, Alden Whitman of the New York Times. In it Sidney quoted Ben Hecht (whom, along with A.J. Liebling, Ring Lardner, Damon Runyon, Walter Winchell and First Amendment absolutists William O. Douglas and Hugo Black, among others, he once identified as his alma mater) eulogizing a departed colleague at the Chicago Journal in 1920:

We know each other's daydreams
And the hopes that come to grief
For we write each other's obits
And they're Godalmighty brief.

Sidney wrote for The Nation about the First Amendment and sports, but for everybody else (including the New York Post; the Times; the Soho Weekly; Harper's; Scanlan's, a magazine he founded with Warren Hinckle in the early 1970s; the New York Observer; and the New York Daily News) he wrote about everything else. In recent years he wrote mostly about hospital negligence (which he believed to be responsible for his daughter's tragic death--and brought a historic lawsuit to prove it), those he called "the smoke fascists," Israel's friends and foes, and his favorite Jewish gangsters (especially Meyer Lansky and Israel Schawartzberg).

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