A Dissenter’s Dissenter

You all know the phrase “a ballplayer’s ballplayer,” which describes someone whose qualities are best appreciated by people in the game. Manny was a socialist’s socialist, a dissenter’s dissenter. Only people close to the magazine can even begin to understand the importance of the part he played over many years. If you have written for Dissent but are not part of the inner circle, you probably don’t know or can’t acknowledge how much of your best prose. . . was Manny’s.

“One of the oldtimers”—that’s the way I thought of him when I first met him: he would have been in his early forties. Like the other oldtimers and unlike them: less prickly; less eager for a...