Victor S. Navasky, a Leading Liberal Voice in Journalism, Dies at 90

Mr. Clark was candid to a fault, endorsing the creation of a Palestinian state in “co-union with Jordan” at a time when that position would cost him Jewish voters, and defending a trip he took to Hanoi, the North Vietnamese capital, at the height of the Vietnam War. Mr. Navasky did not try to dissuade him from taking such positions, and Senator Javits won handily despite an anti-Republican tide that year spurred by the Watergate scandal.

After stepping down in 2005 to become The Nation’s publisher emeritus, Mr. Navasky taught magazine writing and editing at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, directed its George T. Delacorte Center for Magazine Journalism and chaired The Columbia Journalism Review. The last position drew complaints from conservative media that he was a partisan holding a leadership position with a watchdog journal that was supposed to impartially assess the quality and ethics of newspapers, magazines and other media.

Mr. Navasky applied his leftist outlook in at least one corner of his personal life — his vacation home, in Hillsdale, in Columbia County near the Connecticut border. In 1971, he, a friend and their wives purchased a 130-acre property there that they divvied up among 13 people and their families — including a painter, a poet, a violinist, an astrophysicist, an N.A.A.C.P. lawyer, a psychotherapist and several writers.

It seemed to a Times reporter describing the arrangement in a 2009 article the equivalent of a 1960s commune, minus the drugs and group sex. Ever the independent thinker, Mr. Navasky rejected that description.

“Really,” he said, “it’s more of a middle-class convenience than a ’60s commune.” It was also, he added, “weirdly nonpolitical.”

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, a longtime book critic for The Times who died in 2018, and Alex Traub contributed reporting.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/24/business/media/victor-s-navasky-dead.html