Uncle Jimmy Weinstein.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Editorial - Obituary

I was at the Media Reform Conference in St. Louis in May, and I ran into Salim Muwakkil, a senior editor of In These Times magazine.

"How's Jimmy doing?" I asked.

"Not well," Salim said, shaking his head. "He's got brain cancer. He's dying."

James Weinstein, historian, editor, activist, founder of In These Times, man of the left, died on June 16.

But he was always Jimmy to me, an old, funny, cantankerous uncle I'd see once a year at the annual In These Times-Progressive baseball games that we kept going for more than a decade.

I can still see Jimmy and his skinny legs on the mound. There he is, intent on getting us all out with his slow, looping pitch. He'd even go to the batting cage a week or two beforehand to get his swing down. He liked the action, and he savored the bratwurst and the blueberry pie almost as much as the bragging rights.

I've been reading In These Times ever since Joe Schwartz, a graduate student at college, showed me a copy twenty-eight years ago.

I liked it immediately. It did not have the screaming headlines of the sectarian leftwing publications, and it had a lot of interesting reporting.

Under Jimmy's leadership, In These Times made three commitments that distinguished it from other magazines: It covered the labor movement, it covered race, and it covered pop culture. It still does. In the last fifteen years, In These Times also has taken environmentalism seriously, seeing in it a way to sing beyond our choir. And Jimmy paid attention to electoral politics at a time when some publications, including this one, neglected that arena.

At first, In These Times billed itself as "an independent socialist newspaper," but it dropped the "socialist" after a while and discarded the idea of being a newspaper. But Jimmy never dropped the dream of a democratic socialism, which he studied as a scholar and advanced as a journalist. In his last book, The Long Detour (which I reviewed captiously, I now...