Elegy for David Horowitz

The man who invented “offensive” Zionism

On April 29, David Horowitz, perhaps the most important American Jewish political intellectual of the past four decades, left us at the age of 86.

What with all that is swirling about the world and the magnitude of this loss, I chose to wait and collect my thoughts before offering a eulogy.

David, whom I had the honor of knowing, was once a committed communist. He believed in the “world revolution” and in the perfection of the human condition through “all hitherto existing society”’s destruction. And he was a “red diaper baby” — raised from birth to worship the murderer saints Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin, and obey CPUSA’s every Muscovite directive. If that illustrates anything, it’s that a determined and honorable person can reinvent his life.

David wrote 60 books between 1962 and 2023 — 17 more than Winston Churchill, and 43 as a conservative. Perhaps his greatest are Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes(1999), Uncivil Wars: The Controversy Over Reparations for Slavery (2002), Radicals: Portraits of a Destructive Passion (2012), and his two beautifully written, heartrending memoirs: Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey (1996) and A Cracking of the Heart (2009), a touching memorial to his daughter Sarah, who died in 2007 at 44.

David was a life-long civil rights activist. At the age of nine, in 1948 — before most of his critics were born — he accompanied his parents to a march in support of the Truman administration’s de-segregation of the federal civil service. In 1952, at 13, he was reprimanded by a racist teacher for printing a pamphlet defending a likely innocent black man, Willie McGee, who — unlike any white man before or since — was executed in Mississippi for the rape of a white woman. 

Echoing Ronald Reagan, David said that, while his politics later changed, his commitment to black civil rights changed “not one iota.”

Ironically, David’s disillusion with the left came about because of that genuine devotion. In 1974, he raised thousands of dollars for the Black Panthers to purchase an Oakland church for the purpose of turning it into a school for 150 black inner city children. He asked Betty Van Patter, one of the accountants who worked for his magazine Ramparts — then the most prominent leftist magazine in America — to also take charge of the school’s accounts. Betty, an honest and decent woman, soon discovered vast amounts of dodgy money flowing through the Panthers’ ledgers. On December 13, 1974, she disappeared; just over a month later, on January 17, 1975, her brutally beaten body was found floating in San Francisco Bay.

David, who knew immediately that the Panthers had murdered his friend (whom he had placed in danger), was plunged into a decade of depression and disintegration — a time which eventually destroyed his marriage, his career, and most of his friendships. Betty’s death, and the seeking of some kind of atonement for his inadvertent part in it, became, in one sense, the impetus for the complete reversal of his life’s aim. Finally, in 1985, along with his friend Peter Collier, he published an op-ed in The Washington Post called “Lefties for Reagan,” detailing their reasons for abandoning communism and embracing conservatism.

By the turn of the century, David had not only established himself as a titan of conservative political thought but also of pro-Israel activism. Seeing the emerging mobs of Marxist and Muslim students beginning to terrorize American campuses, he turned much of his genius to arming Jewish students.

Having personally helped organize many of the communist student protests which ravaged Berkeley in the 1960s, nobody knew better than David how to counter their twenty-first-century descendants.

Instead of just saying that Israelis are sweet, try never to kill civilians, and export sublime cherry tomatoes, David and his Freedom Center focused on the fact that Israel’s enemies were evil.

He practically invented the idea of Jewish students going on the offense. For example, when Muslim Brotherhood front-groups and leftist lunatics inflicted “Israel Apartheid Week” on students, David retorted with “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week.”

When mainstream, well-funded Jewish leadership organizations were refusing to help bullied and besieged Jewish college students, David and his colleagues rushed to their aid. They wrote biting, well-documented pamphlets showing that anti-Semitic campus gangs like Students for Justice in Palestine were actually partners of Hamas; created DiscovertheNetworks.org, a database of leftist and Islamic hate-mongers; and, most importantly, emphasized that those who hate Israel support a second Holocaust.

He even created a “Palestinian Wall of Lies,” an installation mocking the vile “apartheid wall”s dominating campuses during “Israel Apartheid Week.”

Even more importantly, like no other, David told the world that anti-Zionists are the ultimate moral hypocrites.

“Who’s the greatest oppressor of women in the world today?!” he bellowed at UCLA in 2011. “It’s Islam! Wake up! Women are chattel! They’re slaves!… If you’re an adolescent girl — 12, 13 — you’re going to have your clitoris sliced off without an anesthetic!… Yet, [from] the Women’s Studies Department here — everywhere — total silence.”

His moral clarity under fire knew no bounds. Almost exactly 15 years ago, in an exchange which garnered 4.8 million views on YouTube, David famously faced down a Muslim Brotherhood student at UC San Diego. After refusing, at his behest, to condemn Hamas, David rephrased his question:

“I am a Jew,” he growled. “The head of Hezbollah has said that he hopes that we will gather in Israel so that he doesn’t have to hunt us down globally — for it, or against it?!” “For it,” the smirking student murmured into the microphone. “Thank you,” he replied.

Though an agnostic, David once said at a synagogue in Century City, California, that Israel “is a miracle among the nations. Yet,” he continued, “it would be foolish to think that the world thinks it needs Israel or the Jews. …[Therefore] you have to come to the very hard but necessary truth that we Jews are hated for our virtues.”

David was a hero not just because he understood the difference between an American and a terrorist, a liberal and a Marxist, and innocent Jews and their murderers, but between good and evil. He had lived with evil, even done evil, had become an historian of evil, and then devoted the rest of his life to battling it.

May his memory be a blessing.