Although we’ve never met, I’d like to take this opportunity to congratulate you for your pending purchase of Newsweek magazine.

I’m not assuming you’re hearing much by way of congratulations these days. After all, everywhere you turn, you come across another report of the magazine industry’s nearing demise: Circulations are down, advertising is down, U.S. News & World Report has abandoned its print edition, 279 magazines folded in 2009 alone, and TV Guide—a magazine that once boasted the highest circulation in the country—was sold for $1, the same price you paid for Newsweek. And yet, you chose to enter the industry at this tough time, and I won’t be surprised if some in your circle tried to talk you out of the move.

As one who has devoted his life to writing for, editing, and publishing magazines—including 30 years as editor and then publisher of The Nation, and now as chairman of Columbia Journalism Review—let me try to put your mind at ease. Magazine journalism, Mr. Harman, isn’t busy dying, it’s struggling to be reborn. And now, as it was in the golden age of magazines, it would likely be us Jews who’ll revolutionize this essential industry.

Jews, after all, have always had a special place in their hearts for magazines. Even at this difficult moment, there is Nadine Epstein’s Moment (“the independent national Jewish magazine”), there is Commentary, there is Tikkun (the anti-Commentary), there is The Jewish Review of Books, there is Lilith (“the American-Jewish feminist magazine”), there is Jewish Frontier (for organized labor), and for young, Holocaust-mocking hipsters there is even Heeb, along with many, many others. If you’re reading this letter, you’re surely also aware of Tablet Magazine, which represents, along with jewcy.com and several other Web sites, innovative attempts to carry on the magazine tradition on a new technological platform.

As you walk into Newsweek’s offices, and as you wonder in which direction to lead a great American magazine, let me share with you a bit of good advice I once received from an unlikely source. Although I disagreed with the late Irving Kristol, the so-called godfather of neoconservatism, on many things, I think he was onto something almost existential when it comes to magazine publishing. “A lot of New York intellectuals”—which is to say, Jews—“have roots in Eastern Europe, where, unlike in England or France, there was no tradition of civility,” he told me once when I was interviewing him about intellectuals and magazines. “In England or France, you operate within a framework of existing institutions. In Eastern Europe, we wanted to change existing institutions, to improve them. The Cossack was the existing institution, so ideas were more important than institutions. That is why if you disagree with someone, you stop talking to him and start your own magazine.”

I would add that, whatever one thinks of the neoconservative movement, one must concede that, for better or worse, it would not have come into being had it not been for magazines like The Public Interest (co-edited by Kristol), which in effect launched it, and Norman Podhoretz’s Commentary (now edited by his son, John), which nourished it. Most likely, you have no designs to turn Newsweek into an ideological organ; but you would do well to heed Kristol’s advice, and perceive of your magazine not just as a source for news but also as an institution for the manufacturing and dissemination of ideas.

Having sat on the publisher’s chair for enough time myself, however, I can guarantee that if you go on talking about ideas, someone is going to try to tell you that magazines have no place in the Internet’s age of immediacy. Simply remind these gloomy folks that the year’s biggest political story—the fall of the general who wouldn’t shut up, Stanley McChrystal—was caused by a magazine, Rolling Stone, one of the few media organs that still permit reporters to hang out with sources for long periods of time, and that still allocate 7,500 words or more for a worthwhile story. I’d like to see a Web site, or even a newspaper, have this kind of patience.

I am tempted to end my letter by citing any number of examples from the past glories of American magazine journalism. I’m tempted to remind you of Ida Tarbell’s exposé of Standard Oil Co. in McClure’s at the turn of the last century, of John Hershey’s “Hiroshima,” Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” and Hannah Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem” in The New Yorker. But instead, allow me to end with an anecdote that neatly captures what magazines, at their best, can do, and why we need them now more than ever.

Some years ago, when I was helping to put together a group of small shareholders to invest in The Nation, I was making a pitch before a group of well-wishers assembled by my friend Stanley Sheinbaum in his Brentwood, Calif., living room, when a middle-aged woman raised her hand and said, “Count me in. I can’t not invest.” When asked to say more, she told her story. Her father, she said, used to go to shul every Saturday with his father. And his father would sit there with a copy of The Nation on his lap, reading while the rabbi spoke. Why, her then-9-year-old father asked her grandfather, are you reading while the rabbi is talking? “Because,” said her grandfather, “what he is saying up there, I already know, but what this magazine is telling me down here, I don’t know.”

This, Mr. Harman, is our past. It is up to you to make it our future, as well.

But he is also guilty of a fourth betrayal. And it is this fourth betrayal that, in my view, accounts for much of the anger aimed at Lieberman, anger greater than that expressed at the Republican opposition, which has cynically voted as a bloc to block any health-care reform emanating from the Democrats. Lieberman’s fourth betrayal is the betrayal of his Jewish heritage.

It may quickly be pointed out that the neoconservative movement itself is populated mostly by Jews and that the so-called godfather of neo-conservatism, Irving Kristol, was himself a Jew. Therefore, some may think, it would seem illogical, irrational, and ahistorical to be angry at Lieberman for betraying his Jewishness by adopting a conservative stance. Maybe so. But in my (Jewish) judgment, it’s a fact.

And it’s a fact whether one regards Judaism as a religion or a culture. Whether one is Orthodox, Conservative, or Reform, whether one is a Zionist or an assimilationist, whether one is a Hasid or a heretic, what unites people of the Jewish faith, persuasion, or heritage is their internalization of the ethical imperative.

Whatever one’s politics, the threat of a fellow Jew to undermine all health-care reform if he does not get his way would seem to run counter to a people whose moral heritage includes wanting to take care of those less fortunate than themselves. (As Marissa Brostoff wrote in an earlier Tablet article, it all goes back to Maimonides, who in effect said that universal health care is an absolute necessity.)

Rabbi Jill Jacobs makes this clear in her new book, There Shall Be No Needy: Pursuing Social Justice Through Jewish Law and Tradition. “Jewish legal texts,” Jacobs writes, “impose on the community an obligation to provide financial and other resources for the ill.” No less a rabbinic authority than Shlomo Goren, chief Ashkenazi rabbi of Israel from 1973 to 1983, sounded a similar note when he argued during a doctors’ strike that “the government may not excuse itself from its responsibility toward the sick since the government is responsible for the health of the people, not the doctors.”

Cynics claim that Lieberman’s opposition to a competitive government-run health care option is prompted by all the private insurance companies in his home state, companies that have supported him through the years. But even if his principal objection is a matter of principle, his fellow Jews (and others) should wonder why not simply vote no rather than bring down the house (i.e., the Senate) and the whole health-care bill with it.

No wonder a people whose legacy is near-universal support for FDR’s New Deal are offended when one of their own invokes the public health insurance option as a pretext for undermining the principle of near-universal health care.

If Lieberman were a gentile, it would, for many Jews, be a mere political disagreement. But Lieberman being Lieberman, the feeling is that he should be ashamed of himself. And by the way, he should.

It was the lead obit, it appeared the day after he died, it featured a flattering photo, it ran to a respectable length, it accurately identified most of the highlights of his uniquely colorful and controversial career, and it didn’t mention his dropping the dime on Daniel Ellsberg, which caused the Times to blacklist him at the time, until three-quarters of the way down in the piece. Instead, the obit highlighted his lawsuit against the hospital he held responsible for his daughter Libby’s tragic death. It was fair.

But for me, it didn’t capture what made Sidney Sidney, which had to do with his unique take on both his journalism and his Jewishness. Since I was there, so to speak, at the creation, herewith my Sidney Zion, aka El Sid.

I first met El Sid in the fall of 1956, when we were fellow students at Yale Law School. I was attempting to launch Monocle, which we called “a leisurely quarterly of political satire.” (That meant it would only come out twice a year.) A classmate said that if I was starting a satire magazine, I had to meet Sidney. When I asked why, he said meet him and you’ll see why.

I met, I saw, and he conquered. In the obit, the Times called Sidney Runyonesque, and indeed the cigar-smoking, scotch-sipping, Hit-Parade-humming Sidney’s first story for Monocle—about the integration of a grade school in Arkansas, over the opposition of its governor, Orville Faubus—was called “The Day They Put the Snatch on Orville.” It included a cast of characters right out of Runyon, and it was written in Runyon’s trademark present-tense Broadwayese.

We immediately hit it off, and not just because we, as would-be journalists, were both fans of Yale’s odd-man-out law professor, Fred Rodell, who taught his seminars at Mory’s, a local bar, so that he could partake of their libations. What really impressed Sidney was his discovery that in 1946, when I was in the eighth grade, I had worked as a “volunteer” (actually, we were paid $2 an hour) to pass a contribution basket at Ben Hecht’s play, A Flag is Born, which advocated for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The money, although nobody said it out loud at the time, was going to support the Irgun Zvai Leumi, Menachem Begin’s militant underground movement.

Hecht, it turned out, was Sidney’s hero. Not just because he was a journalist’s journalist, playwright, screenwriter, and man about town, but because, as the author of A Guide For The Bedevilled—Sidney’s bible—he was a Jew’s Jew. Sidney, who kept track of these things, reminded me that after A Flag is Born closed, Hecht had used his own proceeds from the play to take out an ad in The New York Herald Tribune congratulating the Irgun on blowing up British trains, robbing British banks, killing British Tommies.

Not that we were in political sync across the board. We both saw ourselves as First Amendment absolutists in the Black-Douglas tradition, and we both had a healthy contempt for what we thought of as Harvard-inspired Frankfurterian judicial self-restraint. But Sid, it turned out, had been chairman of the Eisenhower for President Club while a student at the University of Pennsylvania, whereas I, in the argot of the day, had been “Madly for Adlai.” When I asked Sid how he could have supported the Republican, he passionately explained that Roosevelt, whom he considered an anti-Semite, “didn’t lift a finger” to save the Jews of Europe. As Ben Hecht had once put it, FDR was “the humanitarian who snubbed a massacre.”

Monocle, it turned out, was a short-lived magazine. It graduated from Yale Law along with the rest of us, and after a number of years as what we called “a radical sporadical,” it expired in 1965. But it had a long-run impact on Sid’s life.

He met his wife-to-be, Elsa Heister, at a Monocle party. And in 1962, when the New York newspapers went on strike, Monocle put out a parody of the New York Post, called The Pest, to which Sid contributed a column in the cryptic style of the paper’s incomparable columnist, Murray Kempton.

Nora Ephron, herself a contributor to The Pest, tells what happened next: “The story was that the editors of the Post were in a rage. [They] wanted to sue. And Dolly [Schiff, the newspaper’s legendary owner] said, ‘Don’t be idiots. If they can parody us they can write for us. Hire them.’” And that’s what happened. After the Post, Sid went on to report on and cogitate about the law for The New York Times, to columnize for the Daily News, and to write for periodicals too numerous to mention.

I’ve already said that Sid had a love-hate relationship with the Times. Let me give an example. In his last years at the Times, Sid got a tip that Judge Henry Friendly, then perhaps the preeminent appellate court judge in the country and prominently mentioned as a possible U.S. Supreme Court nominee, many years earlier failed to disqualify himself from ruling on a case in which he had a conflict of interest. Assured by Managing Editor Abe Rosenthal that if he got the goods the Times would print the piece, Sidney spent the next weeks definitively documenting the story. But when the time came to print it, Rosenthal was overruled by James Reston, who was then running the paper. Reston summoned Zion into his 10th floor office, and from behind his imposing desk, explained that if Friendly actually received a Supreme Court nomination, the Times would run the story. But absent that, Reston was not about to run a piece that would cast a dark shadow on Friendly’s otherwise distinguished career.

“The difference between you and me, Mr. Zion,” Reston said, “is that you were brought up as a poor Jew on the scrappy streets of Passaic, New Jersey, whereas I was brought up in the Church of Scotland outside of Glasgow.” At this point, Sidney rudely interrupted. “I thought that the difference between us,” he said, “is you are sitting there, whereas I am sitting here.”

In 1971, after he quit the Times to co-found Scanlan’s Monthly with Warren Hinckle, Sidney made worldwide news and incurred what seemed at the time the everlasting enmity of his erstwhile Times colleagues because he named Daniel Ellsberg as the leaker of the Pentagon Papers. He was roundly denounced as a snitch, an informer. How could he do such a thing?

For better or worse, here’s how. From Sid’s perspective, the Times was campaigning for a Pulitzer Prize that it didn’t deserve. The man who took the real risks was the man whom the Times said the world would never know. Oh yeah?, said macho Sid, who vowed to prove his prowess as an investigative reporter and bragged that he could find out who it was in a matter of days, and did just that. After he announced his find on the radio, the world descended on Sid The Informer.

This all struck me as ironic, because Sid himself had long detested those who played the informer. In fact, one of the first pieces Scanlan’s ran was titled “Hello, Informer,” a reprint of Elia Kazan’s testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Scanlan’s sent him a check for $150, which he never cashed.

A few weeks before Sidney died, my friend Christopher Lehmann-Haupt and I had dinner with him at Frankie and Johnnie’s, one of his favorite haunts, and wouldn’t you know it, we had a long and loud argument about Israel. It was two against one—or three against one, since the woman at the next table vociferously took objection to my point that not all those who objected to the settlements or Israel’s failure to honor Palestinian human and civil rights and liberties were “anti-Israel.” There were cries and gnashing of teeth, but had there not been, it wouldn’t have been Sid. And now the world is poorer without his furor.

Although he fasted on Yom Kippur and went to shul on the High Holidays, I never realized that Sidney, who fraternized with more than his share of mobsters, who spent too many evenings commuting between the bars at Gallagher’s, Frankie and Johnnie’s, and Elaine’s, was particularly religious. So I was surprised to learn at his funeral that his daily ritual included the laying of teffilin. According to the rabbi, “totafot,” the word the Torah uses to describe the teffilin, is either untranslatable or means “immovable.” Now that I think about it, I am no longer surprised. El Sid was definitely untranslatable, and he was certainly immovable.

Victor Navasky, a political columnist for Tablet Magazine, is a professor at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism and the chairman of the Columbia Journalism Review.