David Horowitz’s death on April 29, 2025 closes the chapter on a figure who embodied the neoconservative phenomenon: a Jewish intellectual who, like many of his generation, abandoned the Left when he perceived its ideals as incompatible with Jewish interests and American security.

Horowitz was born on January 10, 1939, in Forest Hills, Queens, New York, to Phil and Blanche Horowitz, both Jewish high school teachers and committed members of the Communist Party USA. His father taught English, and his mother taught stenography. Horowitz’s family background deeply shaped his early political outlook — his mother’s family had emigrated from Imperial Russia in the mid-19th century, while his father’s family fled Russia in 1905 during pogroms. In 1940, the family moved to the Long Island City section of Queens.

Growing up in a staunchly communist household, Horowitz was the quintessential “red diaper baby.” He attended Columbia University, where he earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1959, and later received a master’s degree in English literature from the University of California, Berkeley.

After completing his graduate studies, Horowitz moved to London in the mid-1960s to work for the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation. There, he became involved in anti-war activism, helping to form the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign in 1966 alongside members of the Trotskyist International Marxist Group. During this period, he wrote The Free World Colossus: A Critique of American Foreign Policy in the Cold War, establishing himself as a voice in the New Left movement.

Horowitz returned to the United States in January 1968 and became co-editor of Ramparts magazine, an influential publication of the New Left based in California. During the early 1970s, he developed a close friendship with Huey P. Newton, founder of the Black Panther Party. Horowitz assisted the Panthers with their community initiatives, including raising funds for a school for “disadvantaged” children in Oakland.

The turning point in Horowitz’s political journey came in December 1974, when Betty Van Patter, a bookkeeper whom Horowitz had recommended to work for the Black Panthers, was found murdered in San Francisco Bay. Her body had been severely beaten, and Horowitz became convinced that members of the Black Panther Party were responsible for her death.

This tragedy profoundly traumatized Horowitz. According to Hugh Pearson, author of Shadow of the Panther: Huey Newton and the Price of Black Power in America, Horowitz “totally went berserk with regard to the left-liberal community” following Van Patter’s murder. The incident shattered his belief in the moral righteousness of the radical left and catalyzed his political transformation.

Increasingly disillusioned with left-wing politics through the late 1970s and early 1980s, Horowitz underwent a gradual but decisive shift to the right. In 1985, he publicly announced that he had voted for Ronald Reagan in the previous year’s presidential election. Along with his writing partner Peter Collier, Horowitz published an essay in The Washington Post titled “Lefties for Reagan,” formally declaring their break with the left. They wrote that voting for Reagan was “way of finally saying goodbye to all that… to the self-aggrandizing romance with corrupt Third Worldism; to the casual indulgence of Soviet totalitarianism; to the hypocritical and self-dramatizing anti- Americanism which is the New Left’s bequest to mainstream politics.”

Following his political conversion, Horowitz dedicated himself to challenging what he saw as the dangerous influence of the left in American culture and politics. In 1988, he founded the Center for the Study of Popular Culture (CSPC) in Los Angeles, which aimed to “establish a conservative presence in Hollywood and show how popular culture had become a political battleground.” The organization was later renamed the David Horowitz Freedom Center (DHFC) in 2006.

Horowitz chronicled his ideological journey in his 1996 memoir Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey, which became one of his most significant works. This deeply personal account detailed his disillusionment with the left and his embrace of conservative principles. It was quoted by Kevin MacDonald in Chapter 3 of The Culture of Critique illustrating the point that leftist Jews remained committed, ethnocentric Jews despite their declared internationalism:

David Horowitz (1997, 42) describes the world of his parents who had joined a “shul” run by the CPUSA in which Jewish holidays were given a political interpretation. Psychologically these people might as well have been in eighteenth-century Poland:

What my parents had done in joining the Communist Party and moving to Sunnyside was to return to the ghetto. There was the same shared private language, the same hermetically sealed universe, the same dual posturing revealing one face to the outer world and another to the tribe. More importantly, there was the same conviction of being marked for persecution and specially ordained, the sense of moral superiority toward the stronger and more numerous goyim outside. And there was the same fear of expulsion for heretical thoughts, which was the fear that riveted the chosen to the faith.

One of Horowitz’s primary focuses as a conservative activist was challenging what he perceived as liberal bias in American universities. He published The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America in 2006, criticizing professors he believed were engaging in indoctrination rather than education. He also created the “Academic Bill of Rights,” aimed at eliminating political bias in university hiring and grading practices.

Horowitz organized numerous campaigns on college campuses, including “Islamofascism Awareness Week” in 2007, which sought to alert students about what he viewed as the threat posed by radical Islam. These events often generated controversy and resistance from students and faculty.

After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Horowitz’s activism took on a new dimension. He became increasingly focused on what he called “the efforts of the radical left and its Islamist allies to destroy American values.” Horowitz pushed the envelope by advocating for racial and ethnic profiling of “potential terrorists-and that does mean Islamic and Palestinian terrorists.” He likely would have loved The Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther.

Horowitz, much like many of his peers in the largely Jewish neoconservative movement, was deeply affected by the 1967 Six-Day War and unsettled by the anti-Israeli rhetoric of Black nationalist groups in the 1960s and 1970s, steering him toward a strong pro-Israeli position. Though Horowitz publicly maintained that he was not a hardcore Zionist, his tendency to defend Israel at every opportunity suggests a deep alignment. In fact, he once argued, “If the Arabs disarm there will be peace, if the Jews disarm there will be a massacre,” contradicting his statement about being a lukewarm Zionist.

His stance on Israel became particularly pronounced after 9/11, as he increasingly claimed to view criticism of Israel as part of a broader anti-Western agenda. Horowitz became a fierce critic of Democrats who he claimed “empowered” Israel’s enemies, including “Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, ISIS and Hamas.” In 2016, he published a controversial essay in Breitbart News accusing conservative Jewish writer William Kristol and other “Never Trumpers” of trying “to weaken the only party that stands between the Jews and their annihilation, and between America and the forces intent on destroying her.” Kevin MacDonald in VDARE (2016):

One of the more spectacular examples of an MSM frenzy over supposed anti-Semitism: the reaction to the attack by David Horowitz against his fellow Jew Bill Kristol, leader of a campaign to destroy Donald Trump [Bill Kristol: Republican Spoiler, Renegade Jew, May 15, 2016] The headline, written by Horowitz, alluded to Kristol being Jewish.

As Jonathan S. Tobin [Email him] notes in Commentary,

[T]he real offense here is … his attempt to wrap him in the Star of David and to somehow brand his opponents as traitors to the pro-Israel cause. …

[H]is invocation of “America First” and the use of a term like “renegade Jew” in the headline (though not in the text of the article) seems to echo the smears of the pro-Trump alt right racists who have attacked conservative critics of the candidate with an avalanche of anti-Semitic invective.

[Breitbart’s ‘Renegade Jew’ Disgrace, May 16, 2016]

Horowitz’s offense was not simply criticizing Kristol’s campaign against Trump. Lots of people have done that without incurring the wrath of Commentary. And even saying that Kristol’s views are not good for Jews and Israel is commonplace: Mondoweiss, J Street, and Mearsheimer and Walt in The Israel Lobby argue that neoconservatives and the Israel Lobby have a tragically mistaken view of Jewish and Israeli interests—also discussed in Charles Bloch’s and Steve Sailer’s VDARE posts.

The unforgivable offense: implying Kristol’s being a Jew had something to do with his opposition to Trump. After all, there would have been exactly zero upset if instead the headline was “Bill Kristol: Republican Spoiler, Renegade Republican.”

But putting ‘Jew’ in the headline was guaranteed to bring out immediate charges of anti-Semitism by the likes of Michelle Goldberg [Email her] in Slate :

To define someone as a ‘Renegade Jew’ in a column about scheming elites written for an audience full of white nationalists is to signal to the sewers. … A narrative is taking shape, an American Dolchstoßlegende that will blame a potential Trump loss on conniving Semites.

[Breitbart Calls Trump Foe “Renegade Jew.” This Is How Anti-Semitism Goes Mainstream, May 16, 2016]

Of course, we are supposed to engage in the fiction that the opinions of Bill Kristol et al. have nothing to do with being Jewish or what is good for Israel, but everything to do with their perception of what is good for America.

David Horowitz’s life trajectory from dedicated Marxist to conservative firebrand encapsulates much of the ideological turbulence of the latter half of the twentieth century and early twenty-first century. His dramatic political conversion, sparked by personal trauma and disillusionment, led him to become one of the most vocal critics of the movement he once championed.

However, Horowitz’s political career should not be viewed through an ideologically reductionist lens. Mike Peinovich of The Right Stuff aptly observed that Horowitz was first and foremost a Jewish ethnic strategist with a history of changing his political positions to align with what he perceived as Jewish interests. And Jared Taylor pointed out Horowitz’s hypocrisy on identity politics:

Mr. Horowitz is simply wrong when he writes of “going back to the good old American ideal” of multi-racialism. I am certain that if all the prominent Americans I have quoted could rise from their graves, they would endorse the American Renaissance view of race and nation, and would be shocked at the idea of a multi-hued America in which we are to pretend race can be made not to matter. It is American Renaissance that is faithful to the original vision of America. Walt Whitman perhaps put it most succinctly when he wrote, “[I]s not America for the Whites? And is it not better so?” Yes, it is.

Mr. Horowitz deplores the idea that “we are all prisoners of identity politics,” implying that race and ethnicity are trivial matters we must work to overcome. But if that is so, why does the home page of FrontPageMag carry a perpetual appeal for contributions to “David’s Defense of Israel Campaign”? Why Israel rather than, say, Kurdistan or Tibet or Euskadi or Chechnya? Because Mr. Horowitz is Jewish. His commitment to Israel is an expression of precisely the kind of particularist identity he would deny to me and to other racially-conscious whites. He passionately supports a self-consciously Jewish state but calls it “surrendering to the multicultural miasma” when I work to return to a self-consciously white America. He supports an explicitly ethnic identity for Israel but says American must not be allowed to have one.

Not long before he was assassinated, Yitzhak Rabin told U.S. News and World Report that as Prime Minister of Israel he had worked to achieve many things, but what he cared about most was that Israel remain at least 90 percent Jewish. He recognized that the character of Israel would change in fundamental-and to him unacceptable-ways if the non-Jewish population increased beyond a small minority. Equally obviously, the character of the United States is changing as non-whites arrive in large numbers.

Throughout most of its history, white Americans took the Rabin view: that their country had a distinctly racial and ethnic core that was to be preserved at all costs. When Mr. Horowitz writes about the “good old American ideal,” that is what he should have in mind, not a historically inaccurate view that drapes a radical new course with trappings of false tradition.

Horowitz was a foundational figure in neoconservatism, but not as a defender of Western Civilization as some of his supporters like Turning Point founder Charlie Kirk have made him out to be. At the end of the day, Horowitz was an opportunist who shifted political stripes to serve Jewish and Israeli interests.

The way conservatives now praise him is unsettling, but it reveals a harsh truth: their movement owes its current form to him and his cadre of ex-Trotskyist Jews, who effectively turned American conservatism into a vehicle for Zionism. Horowitz’s lifework reveals that any nationalist movement lacking strong gatekeeping against Jewish influence is vulnerable to being co-opted and redirected to serve the interests of world Jewry much to the detriment of White interests.

https://www.unz.com/article/from-red-diaper-to-red-state-the-political-odyssey-of-david-horowitz