David Horowitz facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
David Horowitz
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| Born | David Joel Horowitz January 10, 1939 New York City, New York, U.S. |
| Died | April 29, 2025 (aged 86) |
| Occupation | Conservative activist and writer |
| Education | Columbia University (BA) UC Berkeley (MA) |
| Spouse |
Elissa Krauthamer
(m. 1959; div. 1978)Sam Moorman
(m. 1984; div. 1985)Shay Marlowe
(m. 1990; div. 1995)April Mullvain
(m. 1998) |
| Children | 4, including Ben |
David Joel Horowitz (January 10, 1939 – April 29, 2025) was an American conservative writer and activist. He was a founder and president of the David Horowitz Freedom Center (DHFC); editor of the Center's website FrontPage Magazine; and director of Discover the Networks, a website that tracks individuals and groups on the political left. Horowitz also founded the organization Students for Academic Freedom.
Horowitz wrote several books with author Peter Collier, including four on prominent 20th-century American families. He and Collier have collaborated on books about cultural criticism. Horowitz worked as a columnist for Salon.
From 1956 to 1975, Horowitz was an outspoken adherent of the New Left. He later rejected progressive ideas and became a defender of neoconservatism. Horowitz recounted his ideological journey in a series of retrospective books, culminating with his 1996 memoir Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey.
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Early life and education
Born in the Forest Hills neighborhood of Queens, a borough of New York City, Horowitz was the son of Jewish high school teachers Phil and Blanche Horowitz. His father taught English and his mother taught stenography. His mother's family emigrated from Imperial Russia in the mid-19th century, and his father's family left Russia in 1905 during a time of anti-Jewish pogroms. Horowitz's paternal grandfather lived in Mozir, a city in modern Belarus, prior to leaving for the U.S. In 1940, the family moved to the Long Island City section of Queens.
During years of labor organizing and the Great Depression, Phil and Blanche Horowitz were long-standing members of the American Communist Party and strong supporters of Joseph Stalin. They left the party after Khrushchev published his report in 1956 about Stalin's crimes and his terrorism against the Soviet population.
Horowitz received a Bachelor of Arts from Columbia University in 1959, majoring in English, and a master's degree in English literature at University of California, Berkeley.
Career
New Left
After completing his graduate degree, Horowitz lived in London during the mid 1960s and worked for the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation. He identified as a Marxist intellectual.
In 1966, Ralph Schoenman persuaded Bertrand Russell to convene his war crimes tribunal to judge United States involvement in the Vietnam War. Horowitz would write three decades later that he had political reservations about the tribunal and did not take part. He described the tribunal's judges as formidable, world-famous and radical. They included Isaac Deutscher, Jean-Paul Sartre, Stokely Carmichael, Simone de Beauvoir, Vladimir Dedijer and James Baldwin. In January 1966, Horowitz, along with members of the Trotskyist International Marxist Group, formed the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign. The Vietnam Solidarity Campaign organized a series of protests in London against British support for the Vietnam War.
While in London, Horowitz became a close friend of Deutscher, and wrote a biography of him. Horowitz wrote The Free World Colossus: A Critique of American Foreign Policy in the Cold War. In January 1968, Horowitz returned to the United States, where he became co-editor of the New Left magazine Ramparts, settling in northern California.
During the early 1970s, Horowitz developed a close friendship with Huey P. Newton, founder of the Black Panther Party.
In 1976, Horowitz was a "founding sponsor" of James Weinstein's magazine In These Times.
Rightward evolution
Following this period, Horowitz rejected Marx and socialism, but kept quiet about his changing politics for nearly a decade.
In early 1985, Horowitz and Collier, who also became a political conservative, wrote an article for The Washington Post Magazine entitled "Lefties for Reagan", later retitled as "Goodbye to All That". The article explained their change of views and recent decision to vote for a second term for Republican President Ronald Reagan. In 1986, Horowitz published "Why I Am No Longer a Leftist" in The Village Voice.
In 1987, Horowitz co-hosted a "Second Thoughts Conference" in Washington, D.C., described by Sidney Blumenthal in The Washington Post as his "coming out" as a conservative.
In May 1989, Horowitz, Ronald Radosh, and Collier attended a conference in Kraków calling for the end of Communism. After marching with Polish dissidents in an anti-regime protest, Horowitz spoke about his changing thoughts and why he believed that socialism could not create their future. He said his dream was for the people of Poland to be free.
In 1992, Horowitz and Collier founded Heterodoxy, a monthly magazine focused on exposing what it described as excessive political correctness on United States college and university campuses. It was "meant to have the feel of a samizdat publication inside the gulag of the PC [politically correct] university". The tabloid was directed at university students, whom Horowitz viewed as indoctrinated by the entrenched Left. In Radical Son, he wrote that universities were no longer effective in presenting both sides of political arguments. He stated that left-wing professors had created an atmosphere of political "terror" on campuses.
In 2005, Horowitz launched Discover the Networks.
Horowitz appeared in Occupy Unmasked, a 2012 documentary portraying the Occupy Wall Street movement as a sinister organization formed to violently destroy the American government.
Academic Bill of Rights
In the early 21st century, Horowitz concentrated on issues of academic freedom, attempting to protect conservative viewpoints. He, Eli Lehrer and Andrew Jones published a pamphlet, "Political Bias in the Administrations and Faculties of 32 Elite Colleges and Universities" (2004), in which they find the ratio of Democrats to Republicans at 32 schools to be more than 10 to 1.
Horowitz's book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America (2006), criticized individual professors for, as he alleges, engaging in indoctrination rather than a disinterested pursuit of knowledge.
Horowitz published an Academic Bill of Rights (ABR), which he proposes to eliminate political bias in university hiring and grading. He says conservatives, and particularly Republican Party members, are systematically excluded from faculties, citing statistical studies on faculty party affiliation.
In 2004 the Georgia General Assembly passed a resolution on a 41–5 vote to adopt a version of the ABR for state educational institutions.
In Pennsylvania, the House of Representatives created a special legislative committee to investigate issues of academic freedom, including whether students who hold unpopular views need more protection.
David Horowitz Freedom Center
In 1998 Horowitz and Peter Collier founded the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Politico states that Horowitz's activities and DHFC are funded in part by Aubrey and Joyce Chernick and The Bradley Foundation. Politico stated that during 2008–2010, "the lion's share of the $920,000 it [DHFC] provided over the past three years to Jihad Watch came from [Joyce] Chernick". Between July 2000 and February 2006 the freedom center provided a total of $43,000 in funding for 25 trips taken by Republican senators and representatives including Mike Pence, Mitch McConnell, Bob Barr, Fred Thompson and others. In 2015, Horowitz made $583,000 (~$661 thousand in 2021) from the organization.
Horowitz was the editor of the Center's website FrontPage Magazine. It has been described by scholars and writers as right-wing, far-right, Islamophobic, and anti-Islam.
Political positions
Horowitz was a former Marxist but was later described as being conservative. During his time in the New Left, Horowitz supported the civil rights movement. In the 1970s, he came to believe that the Black Panthers were involved in the death of his friend Betty Van Patter, souring the relationship between Horowitz and the Black Panthers.
Horowitz wrote against US intervention in the Kosovo War, arguing that it was unnecessary and harmful to US interests, but supported the interventionist foreign policy associated with the Bush Doctrine, including the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He also wrote critically of libertarian anti-war views.
Horowitz opposed Barack Obama, illegal immigration, gun control, and Islam. He endorsed Presidents Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump. He supported attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
Personal life
Horowitz was married four times. He married Elissa Krauthamer, in a Yonkers, New York, synagogue on June 14, 1959. They had four children together: Jonathan Daniel, Ben, Sarah Rose (deceased) and Anne. Sarah died in March 2008 at age 44 from Turner syndrome-related heart complications. She had been a teacher, writer and human rights activist. She is the subject of Horowitz's 2009 book, A Cracking of the Heart.
Horowitz's son, Ben, is a technology entrepreneur, investor, and co-founder, along with Marc Andreessen, of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
Horowitz's second marriage in 1984, to Sam Moorman, ended in divorce within less than a year. On June 24, 1990, Horowitz married Shay Marlowe in an Orthodox Jewish ceremony. They divorced.
Horowitz's fourth and final marriage was to April Mullvain. The couple met in the mid-1990s, and married two years later. He and April lived in horse country northwest of Los Angeles, where she rescues abused horses and provides equine educational programs.
Horowitz, in 2015, described himself as an agnostic.
Horowitz died from cancer on April 29, 2025, at the age of 86.
See also
In Spanish: David Horowitz para niños
