Joshua A. Spivak, possibly the most significant name in Wagner College’s public presence you have never heard of, has died at the age of 51.
An attorney and public relations executive, Spivak was a senior fellow at Wagner College’s Hugh L. Carey Institute for Government Reform almost from its inception. He began working for Carey Institute founder Seymour P. Lachman in 1996 while pursuing a master’s degree in American history from his alma mater, Brooklyn College, where he had been a reporter covering student government for his school newspaper, The Excelsior.
Lachman, then a New York state senator representing Staten Island and western Brooklyn, left the legislature after 8 years, disillusioned with its top-heavy power structure. Lachman’s vivid, first-hand critique of Albany politics, “Three Men in a Room: The Inside Story of Power and Betrayal in an American Statehouse” (New Press, 2006), quickly became one of the most talked about books in Empire State politics, leading to the founding of the Carey Institute in 2008 (the institute is currently on hiatus).
Josh worked as a legislative affairs writer for Lachman, both while pursuing his M.A. at Brooklyn College and, later, as a law student at Columbia.
Spivak “had a knowledge of politics and history like nobody I had ever seen, let alone a 20-something kid,” recalled Doug Perlson, Lachman’s chief of staff. “I soon came to rely on Josh for everything from legislation to press releases to op-eds.”
After passing the bar exam in 2001, Spivak worked for a couple of years as an associate at the firm of Stroock & Stroock & Lavan before switching gears and joining Ripp Media, a legal media/public relations practice. His boss, Alan Ripp, wrote in the New York Law Journal that Josh “was my most trusted adviser and collaborator and the key to my own success in Big Law P.R.”
Lachman asked Spivak to join him when he opened the Carey Institute at Wagner College in 2008, bringing Josh on as a senior fellow to write white papers on good-governance issues and to craft op-ed essays on the history of public policies under debate. Over the years, Josh’s op-eds and citations in public-affairs news stories, published in all of the major national news publications and broadcasts — more than 400 of them, all told — brought wider recognition to Wagner than did, perhaps, any other single individual associated with the college.
In particular, Spivak became the nation’s foremost expert on recall elections, publishing his guide to the political phenomenon, “Recall Elections: From Alexander Hamilton to Gavin Newsom,” in 2021. Josh was also the author behind the Recall Elections Blog, created in November 2010; his last blog entry was posted just days before his untimely death.
Born on Aug. 24, 1973, into an Orthodox Jewish family in Brooklyn’s Flatbush section, Joshua Spivak spent his last night on earth at home, listening to his younger son review the chanting he would do at his bar mitzvah a couple of weeks later — while Josh read “The Federalist Papers.” “He was a master multitasker to the end,” observed his wife, Amelia. Josh died in his sleep early Saturday morning, July 12, 2025.
In addition to his wife, Joshua A. Spivak is survived by their two sons, his parents, and his three siblings.
