About Jonathan Alter

Jonathan Alter is an award-winning author, political analyst, documentary filmmaker, columnist, television producer and radio host.

Alter’s most recent book is “His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life.” (2020), which received uniformly favorable reviews. His earlier books include three New York Times bestsellers: “The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies” (2013), “The Promise: President Obama, Year One” (2010) and “The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope” (2006), also one of the Times’ “Notable Books” of the year.

A former senior editor and columnist at Newsweek, Alter is a longtime political analyst for NBC News and MSNBC. He co-produced and co-directed the HBO documentary “Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists,” which won the 2020 Emmy for Outstanding Historical Documentary. In 2013-2014, he was an executive producer of “Alpha House,“ a comedy on Amazon.

Over the years, Alter has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Washington Monthly, the New Yorker, Bloomberg, the Daily Beast and other publications. In 2021, he launched a weekly Substack newsletter called “OLD GOATS, Ruminating with Friends,” which includes frequent columns and his conversations with accomplished people of wisdom and experience. Since 2016, he has hosted “Alter Family Politics“ each week on Sirius XM, 102 with his three adult children.

All told, Alter has interviewed nine of the last ten American presidents either before, during, or after their presidencies.

The 2020 campaign marked the tenth presidential election Alter covered for major news organizations. He has known President Biden for decades and profiled him in 2016 in The New York Times Magazine.

At Newsweek, Alter wrote more than 50 cover stories, which included everything from Bill Clinton’s first interview after leaving the presidency, to Barack Obama’s first-ever magazine cover, to Alter’s personal story of living with cancer. Beyond politics and media, he has written extensively over the years about foreign policy, education, fiscal policy, terrorism, anti-Semitism, at-risk children, national service and a wide variety of other issues.

Alter has earned honorary degrees from Western Connecticut State University, Montclair State University, and William Paterson University.

Besides the Emmy, his many journalism awards include two National Headliner Awards, two New York State Bar Association Media Awards, the John Bartlow Martin Award, the Lowell Mellett Award, the Gerald Loeb Award, the Clarion Award, and the Mentoring USA Award. He was also part of the Newsweek teams awarded the prestigious National Magazine Award for General Excellence in 1993, 2002, 2004.

He received the first prize Book Award from the New Jersey Council of the Humanities for “The Defining Moment” and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for “The Promise.”

Alter was a Fellow of the Japan Society in Tokyo (1993), the Ferris Visiting Professor of Press and Politics at Princeton University (1997), the Rhodes Visiting Professor at Arizona State University (2009), and visiting professor at Montclair State University (2016).

Beyond his books on presidents, Alter is the author “Between the Lines: A View Inside American Politics, Media and Culture” (a collection of 20 years of his Newsweek columns), the co-author of “Selecting a President: A Citizens’ Guide to the 1980 Election” and the co-editor of “Inside the System” (a collection of Washington Monthly articles).

He is chair of the board of the J. Anthony Lukas Prize Project, which provides cash awards for non-fiction authors, and serves on the boards of the Century Foundation, the Bone Marrow and Cancer Foundation, the Blue Card, and the Historians Advisory Council of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial.

He is married to Emily Lazar and they live in Montclair, New Jersey.