SKOAL!:

Hentoff looked like an Old Testament prophet--"I belong to the 4,000-year-old tradition of atheistic Judaism," he told me, as I edited one of his pieces--and could argue the law better than most lawyers, lecturing judges on precedents and procedures. But he wasn't an argumentative man. Instead, he practiced persuasion in his 70-plus years of work. As the journalist Tobin Harshaw once observed, Hentoff could provoke intense disagreement among his readers without necessarily provoking anger. While he didn't bring peace to the American valley, his work did inspire respect across the political spectrum. What other writer could possibly earn a Viking's send-off from both National Review and the Nation?

In his later years, Hentoff's opposition to abortion made him persona non grata in many corners, including at the Voice, where some writers shunned him. He opposed abortion, he said, for the same reason he opposed capital punishment: To make any sense, he wrote, the fight for life must be "indivisible." The position made him a million enemies on the left, as did his criticisms of other forms of political piety. Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, Hentoff wrote, were as insincere protectors of the Bill of Rights as George W. Bush. But the enmity Hentoff faced made him happy, because he didn't take himself that seriously. "I found out that having a byline can quickly make you an authority to people who aren't very intelligent about authority," he said in a documentary about his life.

Hentoff loved practically all music but especially jazz, making his first professional mark as a disc jockey and then as a critic. "No writer did more for jazz," acknowledged the critic Terry Teachout. Hentoff's close relationships with such jazz figures as Miles Davis, Art Blakey, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, Bill Evans and Charles Mingus, all of whom he wrote liner notes for, made him "one of the last living links to the founding fathers," as Teachout put it. (One of Hentoff's most famous sets of liner notes was for--you guessed it--Bob Dylan.) Hentoff returned to the subject of jazz again and again in his books and articles, as if recharging himself for his more profane works. Reading his pieces, you find yourself humming to a deep rhythm of his invention.

Tweet   @brothersjudd