Seth Lipsky is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal, the founding editor of the Forward and a director of Forward Newspaper LLC. Born in Brooklyn in 1946, he grew up near Great Barrington, Mass., and in 1968 was graduated from Harvard University with a bachelor's degree in English. He worked during college summers on his home-town weekly, the Berkshire Courier, and a nearby daily, the Berkshire Eagle, in Pittsfield, and was Harvard campus stringer for Time magazine. He filed for the Berkshire Eagle from Israel in the weeks after the Six Day War of 1967.

After graduation, Mr. Lipsky took a job on the Anniston (Ala.) Star, for which he covered, among other events, the Democratic National Convention of 1968. Drafted in January 1969, he served two years in the U.S. Army, the second year as a combat reporter in Vietnam for the Pacific Stars and Stripes. He spent three years as a reporter in the Detroit bureau of The Wall Street Journal. In 1974 he became an assistant editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review. In April 1975 he helped cover the fall of Saigon for the Journal and its sister weekly, the National Observer.

In September 1976 Mr. Lipsky joined the founding staff of The Asian Wall Street Journal, becoming its managing editor in 1978. In 1980 he returned to the U.S. as associate editor of the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. He subsequently served as foreign editor, senior editor and a member of the Journal's editorial board. In 1984 he moved Brussels, where he served as editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal Europe edition. In 1986, the editorial page of the Asian edition was added to his responsibilities.

In January 1990, Mr. Lipsky resigned from the Journal to lead the effort to bring out the Forward in English as a national Jewish newspaper in the United States. In 1995, he and three partners acquired a minority ownership of the Forward as part of a medium term plan to restore the Forward to daily publication. Mr. Lipsky resigned as editor and president of the Forward in May 2000, the 10th anniversary of the newspaper's launch in English.