Victor Saul Navasky


Victor Saul Navasky is an American journalist, editor and academic. He is publisher emeritus of The Nation and George T. Delacorte Professor Emeritus of Professional Practice in Magazine Journalism at Columbia University. He was editor of The Nation from 1978 until 1995 and its publisher and editorial director from 1995 to 2005. Navasky's book Naming Names is considered a definitive take on the Hollywood blacklist. For it he won a 1982 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
He was awarded the I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence by Harvard's Nieman Foundation in 2017.

Early life and education

Navasky was born in New York City, the son of Esther and Macy Navasky. In 1946, when he was in the eighth grade, he helped to raise money for the Irgun Zvai Leumi — by passing a contribution basket at performances of Ben Hecht’s play, A Flag is Born.
He is a graduate of Swarthmore College, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and received high honors in the social sciences. While serving in the United States Army from 1954 to 1956, he was stationed at Fort Richardson in Alaska. Following his discharge, he enrolled in Yale Law School on the GI Bill and received his LL.B. in 1959. While at Yale, he co-founded and edited the political satire magazine Monocle.

Career

Before joining The Nation, Navasky was an editor at The New York Times Magazine. He also wrote a monthly column about the publishing business for the Times Book Review.
Navasky was named the editor of The Nation in 1978. In that forum, for many years, he was immortalized in Calvin Trillin's Uncivil Liberties column as "the wily and parsimonious Victor S. Navasky," or "The W. & P." for short.
Navasky is a notable supporter of alleged Soviet spy Alger Hiss, having published vociferous defences of the man's innocence in The Nation both during and after his lifetime.
In 1994, while on a year's leave of absence from The Nation, he served first as a fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and then as a senior fellow at the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center at Columbia University. When he returned to The Nation, he led a group of investors in buying the magazine, and became its publisher.
Navasky has also served as a Guggenheim Fellow, a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation and Ferris Visiting Professor of Journalism at Princeton University. He has taught at a number of colleges and universities and has contributed articles and reviews to numerous magazines and journals of opinion.
In addition to his Nation responsibilities, Navasky is also Director of the George T. Delacorte Center for Magazine Journalism at Columbia University, a member of the Board of Independent Diplomat, and a regular commentator on the public radio program Marketplace.
In 2005, Navasky was named chairman of the Columbia Journalism Review. This appointment engendered some controversy; as Navasky's name did not appear on the masthead, critics on the political right saw this as hiding that, despite the magazine's purported lack of political bias, a "major left-wing polemicist is calling the shots at CJR without any mention on the masthead."
In 2005, Navasky received the George Polk Book Award given annually by Long Island University to honor contributions to journalistic integrity and investigative reporting. He serves on the boards of the Authors Guild, International PEN and the Committee to Protect Journalists.
As of 2020, Navasky serves on the board of Defending Rights & Dissent.

Marriage and family

Navasky, who has three children, lives in New York City, with his wife, Anne Navasky.

Publications