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Itz Horowitz

Thread ID: 10250 | Posts: 4 | Started: 2003-10-05

FadeTheButcher [OP]

2003-10-05 00:21 | User Profile

Some old notes taken from Horowitz's autobiography

"When I attempted to raise these questions, I encountered a wall of resistance. Instead of a response, there was only an akward shuffling into the next subject. I began to feel permanently "out of order," an intruder into someone else's conversation. My own thinking, at the time, had been shaped by a book I was reading, The Ordeal of Civility, by John Murray Cuddihy, which had won a National Book Award. In Cuddihy's view, the theories of Marx and Freud were strategies for dealing with their predicament as members of a despised social group. European Jews had been given rights and were admitted to civil society only after the French Revolution. But they had been denied full acceptance through a kind of "institutional racism," a code of civility that continued to put them in their place. It was Cuddihy's thesis that the revolutionary ideas of Marx and Freud were attempts to deconstruct these civil orders, and replace them with a universal one in which they would finally be granted the acceptane they craved. Thus Freud claimed to show that bourgeois civility was a mask for sexual repression, while Marx argued that it mystified economic exploitation. Each had a vision of liberation - science for Freud, socialism for Marx - that would provide a universal solvent in which the significance of ethnic idenities disappeared.

Earlier in my life I would have thought Cuddihy's idea merely peculiar. But the events of the past year had made me acutely conscious of my own ethnicity. In the aftermath of Betty's and Ellen's deaths, I thought about how vulnerable we were because we were white; how this had made it difficult for me, for example, to plead Betty's cause. For the first time in my life, I had felt isolated and helpless because of my race.

I thought how we had extended ourselves to bring justice to others because they were black. How for myself and Ellen this had begun when we were still adolescents, and yet how little this care seemed to be reciprocated. I thought of how Troy Duster had known the Panthers were dangerous, but had done nothing to warn me. Nor could I have reasonably expected him to do anything to help me after Betty was killed. In all my efforts on behalf of black people, I had never thought to ask: Would my black comrades extend themselves to gain justice for me?

I began to review events of the past to which I had paid little attention before, like the expulsion of the Jews from the civil-rights movement in 1966. Jews had funded the movement, devised its legal strategies, and provided support for its efforts in the media and in the universities - and wherever else they had power. More than half the freedom riders who had gone to the southern states were Jews, although Jews constituted only 3 percent of the population. It was an unprecedented show of solidarity from one people to another. Jews had put their resources and lives on the line to support the black struggle for civil rights, and indeed two of their sons - Schwerner and Goodman - had been murdered for their efforts. But, even while these tragic events were still fresh, the black leaders of the movement had unceremoniously expelled the Jews from their ranks. When Israel was attaced in 1967 by a coalition of Arab states calling for its annihilation, the same black leaders threw their support to the Arab aggressors, denouncing Zionism (the Jewish liberation movement) as racism. Rarely had a betrayal of one people by another been as total or as swift. Yet radical Jews like myself had continued our dedication to the black movement for civil rights - to their struggle and their cause. What was it that made us so willing to support those who would treat us like this, who would not support us in return? Why did we think it was all right - even noble - to operate according to standards so different from those that governed others?"

-- David Horowitz, Radical Son, pgs. 274-76

Horowitz abandons Communism to help found the "New Left."

"In the next few years I concentrated on my studies, and did not attempt to find answers to the questions that the Communist debacle had provoked: How had it happened? How had socialist ideas and Marxist economics produced Stalin and his crimes? How could such disasters be avoided in the future? How should socialists relate now to the Soviet state? It was only after I graduated from Columbia adn went on to Berekley that I became seriously concerned with politics again. When I did, it was in conjunction with others of my generation who were forming a "New Left" out of the ashes of the old. We did so out of the conviction that the original passion could be born again, and that we could create a new socialist vision free from the taint that Stalin had placed on the movement our parents had served. When the New Left finally appeared, however, its members ignored the history that had shaped those beginnings. Unwilling to confront the legacy they had inherited from the past, they regarded themselves as offspring of a virgin birth - self-parented and self-invented, just like Eugene Dennis's son."

David Horowitz, Radical Son, p.86

Horowitz begins his autobiography by letting us in on the fact that Karl Marx was his radical Jewish father's mentor. . .

"My father's which I had put up five years earlier [tombstone], was already beginning to whither. I had directed the mason to inscribe it with the words "Life is Struggle," a favourite quote from his mentor, Karl Marx. It was a struggle he had lost long before we finally laid him to rest."

David Horowitz, Radical Son, pg.1

Utopianism is typically the trademark of radical Marxist Jews, like all Rationalists, they believe Life can be planned out on a piece of paper and set up in reality.

"Life is a mystery. I expressed this thought to my father once, when I was a college student ecountering mysticism for the first time. He was a Marxist, and apparently could not face the possibility that life might be a puzzle without a solution. The words sent him into a rage, like a pious man confronted he had discovered the key to life's important questions, and did not want his son to throw it away."

David Horowitz, Radical Son, pg.8

Horowitz reveals radicalism runs in the family. He himself is a third generation radical Jewish agitator. . .what a blessing, diversity is our strength!

"Like his namesake, my grandfather had escaped a kind of slavery in the Pale of Settlement on the Western fringe of the Czarist Empire. With his wife and two infant children he had left Russia in the exodus of 1905, coming to America with thousands of others who were fleeing the pogroms of hetman the Petlura. Like the Hebrews of Exodus, they crossed the sea and made their way to the promised land."

David Horowitz, Radical Son, pg.9

Horowitz's learns his grandfather was a "commited Communist" that returned to the promised land of the Soviet Union. . .other Jews like Trotsky did the same thing. . .

"Recently, however, I received a letter from one of my grandfather's nieces, Betty Tomar (whom I have yet to meet) who still lives in south Jersey, which fills in some of the blanks: "In 1929 the business failed and the family scattered. I think your grandfather Sam, who was a committed Communist, went to Russia." I knew my grandfather Sam was a freethinker and a socialist, but not this. Perhaps it was one of the secrets my mother held behind those pursed lips. On the other had, perhaps it is only the embellishment of someone who doesn't really know.

The same letter from Betty Tomar advises me: "I think if you write your autobiography, the evolution of the intellectual New York Jews from Second Avenue to affluence to Communism to Hippiedom to mature members of the community is normal and probably the story of all our sons and daughters." She adds: "I understand that's happened with you. But in a capitalistic society anyone who doesn't believe in capital is probably a shnook." Betty Tomar was definitely from the Brown side of the family."

David Horowitz, Radical Son, pg.13

Oh here are some more goodies. . .

Horowitz's father joins the Communist Party USA, not suprising at all since the Communist Party USA's membership was always predominantly Jewish. . .

"The one bright feature of my father's melancholic life was his dedication to a worldwide movement for human renewel. Sometime in the Twenties he had joined the Communist Party and given himself to the dream of a socialist revolution."

David Horowitz, Radical Son, pg.19

Horowitz found his father's Communist Jewish radicalism inspiring, so inspiring he himself became a third generation Communist Jewish radical working with subversive anti-white groups like the Black Panthers to undermine American society. . .

"I do not really have an answer to the mystery of origins - to what, in particular, had set my father and eventually, myself on the radical path; to what had inspired the dream of a revolutionary future that shaped all our ends. All I have to answer this question are the notes he left me from his youth, among them a diary he kept in the summer of 1932, when he made a pilgrimage to the promised land."

David Horowitz, Radical Son, pg.19

Horowitz's father Judaism and his alienation from gentile society filled him with a strong desire of wanting to belong. This drove him to Communism. . .

"Fusion and unity - this was the cry of my father's Communist heart. His unquenchable longing to belong."

David Horowitz, Radical Son, pg.21

Horowitz's father went on a pilgrimage to the Soviet Union in the midst of the Ukranian famime, what he found was inspiration. Horowitz is unsettled by Stalin's anti-Semitic purges, he wonders how his father can keep the faith. . .

I never asked my father about his trip to Russia and he never spoke to me about it. Was he too embarrassed by the time I was old enough to listen? Would he have hd too much explaining to do by then: the Moscow Trials, the purges, the Nazi-Soviet Pact?

David Horowitz, Radical Son, pg.22

Horowitz's father became prominant in the Communist Party USA. . .

"Unlike his regular teaching job, the Party constantly pushed the envelope of his talents, making him the union spokesman at his school, and summoning him for a national mission that spring."

David Horowitz, Radical Son, pg.23

Horowitz's father had no problem "wiping out" the anti-Communist enemy. . .

"I look at my father's words wipe out the enemy and marvel at the power he has been able to suck up from the silences and defeats of his life. The Party had given him this strength and made him a man. Yet his new power remained firmly in the Party's control. Without it, he was nothing. In his heart, my father knew this."

David Horowitz, Radical Son, pg.26

Horowitz's mother was also another Jewish Communist radical and member of the Communist Party USA working to undermine American society. Bill Kristol's mother and father were also both Communists and met at Communist events.

When she came to hear my father speak, my mother was twenty-six and also a party member. That summer she had made her own pilgrimage to the Soviet Union, where she attended a lecture by the Hungarian Marxist Gyorgy Lukas, and visited the Black Sea.

David Horowitz, Radical Son, pg.27

LOL here is my favourite outtake so far. Its a description of Horowitz's father driving across the United States, in the "Bush Country," describing how as a Jewish Communist radical agitator his utter feeling of alienation from America and its people. . .

Before reaching California, my father traveled by bus through Colorado, which inspired emotions of estrangement that were the direct opposite of those he experienced on his Russian journey:

**I've had a feeling, riding on the bus, that I'm in a foreign land. And it strikes me that unless we learn the people in this country of ours so thoroughly so that we won't feel that way, we won't get anywhere. I'm afraid that most of us aren't really "patriotic," I mean at bottom deeply fond of the country and the people." **

David Horowitz, Radical Son, pg.26

FadeTheButcher

2003-10-05 00:32 | User Profile

David learned from his parents that sometimes it is quite useful to establish deceptive fronts for purposes other than those stated. . .

"To a stranger encountering them [Horowitz's parents], they were idealists and registered Democrats who did their citizen part, volunteering in tenant's councils and PTAs, and working for goals that ordinary people could understand and support. But these organizations were fronts for other more serious purposes, serving them as recruiting grounds for the agendas they only revealed later on.

Their real politics were conducted far from view, in the neighbourhood cell meetings of the Communist Party. It was in this subterranean activity that the romanticism of their youth finally got to express itself. Here they lived outside the norms of other mortals, breathed the intoxicating air of a world revolution, and plotted their impossible dreams. In the cell, they were given secret names for the day when the Party would go underground and the illegal business of the revolution begin - as they all believed it would. My mother's Party name was Ann Powers, which sounded like the heroine of a dime-store romance. In their daily routines and to all outsiders, however, they remained scurpulously conventional and law-abiding, as bourgeois and proper as anyone would expect school teachers to be."

David Horowitz, Radical Son, pg.36

Here Horowitz’s parents engage in Communist Party USA activities in an attempt to undermine American society. . .

”While the working-class inhabitants of Sunnyside were exercising their property rights to claim their own, the Communist Party was identifying the Gardens as a topic of opportunity and moving its activists in.”

David Horowitz, Radical Son, pg.37

Horowitz was raised in an American household, loyal to the Soviet Union, that held a deep hatred to the concept of private property. . .

“My parents had no respect for the property rights of the existing owners, who wanted to sell the houses and realize the returns on their investments. To my parents and their friends property was theft; the rights of owners did not exist in any reality they recognized.”

David Horowitz, Radical Son, pg.39

To Horowitz’s mother, there was simply no universal morality, but one morality for the “oppressed” and another for the “oppressors.” Notice the dualism which is similarly expressed in the Talmud. . .

Is this my mother? Is this the voice of the woman who nurtured and cared for me? In her political life it was. To my mother and her comrades, politics was class war conducted by other means. The agent, whatever else he may have been, was an instrument of the hated oppressor. It was this “objective reality,” and not any contingent fact that he might have been a nice person, that determined the morality according to which they would treat him. The aggression displayed by my mother reminds me of my father’s letter to his Columbia instructor: In her case she found and arena which freed her to vent the passions that elsewhere she was unable to express.

David Horowitz, Radical Son, pg.39

Horowitz’s parents radical agitation was unsuccessful, for their Irish and Italian neighbors proved to be of an entirely different culture. . .

The Sunnyside masses had failed to join the vanguard in their protest. Whereas the vision of the progressives was to abolish property once and for all, the dream of the ordinary working people who lived in the Gardens was just the opposite: to own their own Sunnyside home. This was not the only issue that divided them. The progressives had names like Abramson, Adler, Heller, and Wolfman. They were like a tiny scouting party that had infiltrated the camp of an alien tribe, vastly superior in number, who were neither intellectuals nor Communists nor Jews. They were Irish and Italian, and their church was a pillar of the anti-Communist cause. Their names were Bradshaw, Canorazzi, and O’Brien, and the institutions of their Catholic life were visible along Skillman Avenue, where the shops of the neighbourhood were also arrayed. Here were the stations of sin and redemption that marked their mortal progress - the Shamrock Bar & Grill, the Amodeo family grocery, the storefront office of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Saint Teresa’s, and the Shea Funeral Home.”

David Horowitz, Radical Son, pg.40

Even though America had welcomed the Jews with open arms, Jewish radicals like Horowitz’s parents turned their back on American society and sought to actively undermine it. . .

There was an irony in all that was hidden to the Sunnyside progressives, who normally were alert to historical resonances. During the war just ended, America had been the only safe haven for Jews, and this goodwill had only increased afterwards. It was possible that Jews were more accepted, and felt more at home in America at that time, than they had in the 2,000 years since the destruction of the Second Temple. Yet it was at precisely that moment that the progressive tribe of Sunnyside, by dint of their own political choices, found themselves surrounded by hostile forces as intense as their forebears had faced in the past. **

David Horowitz, Radical Son, pg.40

LOL the Communist Party USA was such a Jewish phenomenon that it held afternoon classes in Yiddish.

My parent’s middle-class property was in part a direct response to this hostile environment. My mother even bought a Christmas tree during the holidays, to promote the idea of our normality. But the presence of this Christian symbol so upset her friend Isaiah Heller that he would not set foot in our home during the holiday season. It was not that Isaiah was a religious Jew, but that he felt that my mother’s act showed disrespect for those who had died in the Holocaust. The dispute spread into the Party, and led to the creation of a shul, which held classes in the afternoons. **It was run by Isaiah and Ben Efron the author of a history of the Jews called People Without a Land. The shul was designed to teach us our Jewish heritage from a radical perspective, without religion. **

David Horowitz, Radical Son, pg.42

LOL revealing one face to the goyim and another to the chosen came second nature to Horowitz and his parents. . .

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 posture 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 specifically 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. **

David Horowitz, Radical Son, pg.42

Horowitz personally believes it was his parents Jewry that turned them to radical Communist agitation. He sees similarities between Marxism and the Judaism. . .

This is my own conclusion. My parents never really discussed their decision to become Communists, or the factors that motivated them, with me. It was the unnatural silence because politics was all in other respects the currency of their lives. Almost all conversation in our household was political, other than what was necessary to advance the business of daily life. Despite our disdain for religious belief, the creed we lived by was not dissimilar from that of our ancestors, the “People of the Book” who were forever analyzing the meanings hidden behind the text of life. We had our own guide to these meanings which was not the Torah or the Talmud, but Lenin and Marx. The significance of a text, the meaning of an event, the value of a friendship were evaluated on a scale calibrated to a single standard. How did they measure up to the revolutionary goal?

David Horowitz, Radical Son, pg.42

Horowitz describes how his parents operated within the Communist Party USA in hopes of overthrowing the U.S. Government to realize their radical Marxist Utopia in the United States. Horowitz also distinguishs between “real politics” and superficial politics. It is very interesting to note her that Horowitz’s parents described themselves as “progressives” to goyim, intentionally using an ideological label to fool non-Jews, much like Horowitz and other “neo-conservatives” mislead the goyim today

As a consequence of their decision, they became permanent conspirators in a revolutionary drama. Secrecy enveloped everything they did that was important to them. Like the agents of a secret service, they operated on a “need to know” basis, making it a rule never to discuss their real politics, to identify their associates, or to reveal their Party activities to any outsider. Even my parents’ correspondence was secretive. Initials like “H” and “M,” which intruded among the real names in their letters, represented Party contacts. “H,” for example, was the code for Holland Roberts, whom my father had gone to see on his trip west in 1934. Although Communism was the center of my father’s passionate life, he never mentioned the Party by name, but would refer to it as “the Organization” or, on rare occasions, “the Party,” without specifying which party it was. In fact, I never heard my father use the word “Communist” to describe himself or his political agendas. ***Nor was he alone in this. All my parents’ friends were Party members, but in identifying themselves to political goyim they invariably used the term “progressive.” ***

David Horowitz, Radical Son, pg.43

Even Horowitz agrees that his radical Jewish subversive parents sought to undermine gentile society. . .

And yet, what else could they have expected? Even before they had really sunk roots in America’s soil, they had rejected its fruits. If the faith they had embraced was not “un-American,” as the committee claimed, it was certainly alien to most Americans. Their speech was salted with usages that were unfamiliar and foreign, like “Bolshevik” and “dialectic,” “cadre” and “comrade.” In the land of Washington and Lincoln, their heroes were Marx and Lenin, in democratic America, their goal was to establish a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Instead of being grateful to a nation that had provided them with economic opportunity and refuge, they wanted to overthrow its governing institutions and replace them with a Soviet state.”

David Horowitz, Radical Son, pg.44

FadeTheButcher

2003-10-05 00:35 | User Profile

Inoculation in Communism came early for Horowitz, as was the case for many other the other “red-diaper babies” that later went on to become the Neo-conservative vanguard. . .

When I was a year and a half old, probably as soon as I was able to walk and speak, my parents enrolled me in the Sunnyside Progressive School. It was a Party creation, housing in a three-story brick building located at the point where 47th Street sloped up to meet Queens Boulevard.

David Horowitz, Radical Son, pg.45

Horowitz learned very early in life the importance of deception and appearing “normal.”

My instruction was in the environment I moved in and the air I breathed - the headlines in the Daily Worker carefully folded under the New York Times; the tiles of the political books arrayed on the shelves (Stalingrad, the Scottsboro Boy, the Plot Against the Police); and the adult concerns that surfaced in my parents’ conversations with friends.

David Horowitz, Radical Son, pg.49

By age eleven, Horowitz was a Marxist Jewish radical. . .

As a result of the Marxist ideas I had already absorbed, I was thus able by the age of 11 to dispose of the enduring pathologies of our social condition.

David Horowitz, Radical Son, pg.50

Horowitz learned to distinguish between the world he put on for show to the goyim and his “secret” world. . .

Looking back, I see that there is a way in which my entire youth was a form of quarantine. There was the protective environment of our political community itself, a kind of hospital of the soul. We were embattled, surrounded by enemies, and this made the members of our tribe like family. There was instant recognition by others who shared our values and political commitments, and exaggerated estrangement on the part of those who did not. I was a sociable youngster, good at athletics and quick to make friends, but I was always separated by an invisible wall from the world of my peers. Even before I became close to a playmate, I knew that unless his family shared our politics (and the risks accompanied them), we would always be strangers. **It was not just that a whole area of my life had to be kept secret, but also that, if the wall were ever breached, I knew the friendship would end. **

David Horowitz, Radical Son, pg.45

Like many other radical Marxist Jews, Horowitz and his family became Negro activists out of the usefulness of the Negro’s plight to advance their own agenda

In our political catechism, the suffering of the Negro people was always a central image. The crime against the Negro was like an American crucifixion, and we constantly used it to pierce the veil of American benevolence, revealing the inequality and oppression underneath. Both my parents stayed after school to conduct “extracurricular” Negro History and Culture clubs for their students - my father at Seward Park on the Lower East Side, my mother at Girls’ High in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. My mother’s files contain and old note of condemnation she received where her club put on a play about the “underground railway” and Harriet Tubman. These hides heroes of “the struggle” supplied the material of my fantasy life. When my father and I took our neighbourhood walks, he would explain to me how the streets were named for real-estate magnates and businessmen, and how, after the revolution, they would be renamed. I sensed there was something off in his claim, since I knew that many street names were those of presidents and military figures. But I took up the idea anyway, and began imagining revolutionary names that would replace the old. I began my list with Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglas, and Paul Robeson.

David Horowitz, Radical Son, pg.54

Radical Marxist Jewish activists fastened onto the “Civil Rights” issue and set up many such “Civil Rights” fronts to advance their own agenda. . .

My instruction in the history of the Negro struggle, included reading such books from my parents’ shelves as Howard Fast’s Freedom Road, and an account of the Scottsboro Boys, who had been falsely convicted of raping two white women, and whose case the Party had taken up. Another was We Charge Genocide, which the Party had published through one of its fronts, the Civil Rights Congress, and which contained a petition to the United Nations condemning America’s “genocide” against Negroes. Paul Robeson had written the introduction, and the text was illustrated with a famous photograph - which I could hardly bring myself to look at - of Negroes being lynched by smiling whites. It was part of the Party’s effort to help the Soviet Union by suggesting that the United States was like Nazi Germany.

David Horowitz, Radical Son, pg.55

Notice the racialization of the bourgeois/proletarian Communist idea and its Jewish overtones. . .

Robeson’s presence as a god in our midst seems prophetic to me now. **In my radical generation, black would replace the proletariat in our imagination as the Chosen People who were going to lead the rest of us to the Promised Land. **

David Horowitz, Radical Son, pg.55

Horowitz marches with his family and many of the other radical Communist Jewish agitators in a May Day Communist Party USA parade. . .

That spring, I marched with my parents in the May Day parade, which was organized by the Communist Party. In those days, the women wore dresses in political demonstrations and the men wore suits, carrying their jackets in the early summer heat. Our section marched behind a huge banner that said “New York City Teachers Union,” and we chanted on cue. .

David Horowitz, Radical Son, pg.56

Horowitz’s radical parents, whom he believed were motivated by their Judaism, inculcated Horowitz with radical ideas. . .

From the moment I was given the election talk in my parents’ bedroom their political cause became my passion.

David Horowitz, Radical Son, pg.60

FadeTheButcher

2003-10-05 00:39 | User Profile

Horowitz elaborates on his "secret world." . . . .

As the rifts of the Cold War deepened, it became more and more difficult for me to straddle the two worlds of my childhood. There was some relief in the fact that the members of the 44th Street Cardinals went to parochial schools while their parents read the tabloids and moved in separate social circles from mine. But my public schoolmates, particularly the Jews among them, were not so safely segregated. Some of their parents were "social democrats" who hadbeen under attack from progressives like mine. Their families read the New York Times, and when my father's name appeared in its news section, in 1952, as one of a group of teachers who had been suspended for not answering questions about their political allegiance, **the secret world I inhabited was threatened with exposure. **

David Horowitz, Radical Son, p.61

Horowitz admits his radical Jewish parents were traitors working to undermine society. They were disingenious in calling themselves "progressives," they worked to infiltrate other groups, they camouflaged their agenda by using elaborate front organizations, like David's Institute for the Study of Popular Culture. . .

There was a basic truth in the anti-Communist charnge. My parents and their comrades were indeed conspirators,as anyone could see who cared to look. Their secret names and secret organizations, the elaborate network of front organizations they created to camouflage their agendas, their practice of infiltrating and subverting liberal organizations, and the disingenuousness whith which they presented themselves as "progressives" all added up to a suspicious case. And in their hearts they were indeed loyal to the Soviet state. Their allegience to the socialist future was the root of all their political commitments. For them, Russia was the incarnation of the socialist idea. Their loyalty to Moscow was as inseparable from their faith as was a Catholic's belief in the authority of Rome.

David Horowitz, Radical Son, p.63

Like many Radical Communist Jews, Horowitz's parents were deeply involved in the so-called Civil Rights Movement as part of their plan to undermine society. . .

By this time, the Cold War was so close to being a hot one that it was as though we were behind enemy lines. The only time I felt politically safe was during the two weeks I spent at Wo-Chia-Ca, a summer camp for children of the Communist Party. The Indian-sounding name was an acronym for "Worker's Children's Camp." My buddies there were Billy Gerson and Freddy Jerome, whose fathers were "second string" leaders of the Party indicted under the Smith Act. Freddy's father, V.J. Jerome, was the Party's cultural commissar. I slept over at their house one evening when the dinner guests were the Negro scholar W.E.B. DuBois and his wife, the novelist Shirley Graham. Du Bois was a sprightly 86 and charming. He was (like Robeson) an icon for us, and I had already begun to reverently read his book The Souls of Black Folk. My only disappointment in the evening was that - to the annoyance of everyone at the table - Du Bois's wife, who was much younger than he, constantly interrupted him.

Our camp life was flavored with progressive themes. Pete Seeger, Paul Robeson, and other Party artists made appearances, entertaining us with songs like "If I had a Hammer" and "We Shall Overcome," which later became anthems of the Sixties protests. Every summer there would be a campfire dedicated to the ritual burning of comic books that were "imperialist" or had anti-Communist themes. Even when we engaged in adolescent rites, the consequences could assume political dimensions. Once, when the lights went out after taps, one of my bunkmates yelled "C-cup" into the darkness, provoking the response "Harriet," which was the name of a staffer. The counselor on duty came into the cabin to give us a lecture on male chauvinism.

At the camp we could ventilate the political feelings and attitudes we were forced to mask the rest of the year. Yet here, too, there were limits. After China entered the Korean War and drove America's armies back to the 38th parallel, I sent my parents a postcard that contained a political joke. The Americans are advancing in Korea. Backwards. The postcard was intercepted by my counselor, who called me aside to lecture me, much as Ben Efron had. The FBI read the mail, he said, and my thoughtlessness would endanger not only my parents but the camp itself. There was a background to this warning tht gave it an air of plausibility: After Robeson's public statement that Negroes would not fight for America against the Soviet Union, the camp became the focus of a hostility so intense that armed guards had to be stationed along its perimeter.

David Horowitz, Radical Son, p.64-65

Horowitz's describes how his parents lost their jobs but found employment with various party fronts.

My mother was also called before the superintendent of schools to answer the question about Party membership. Instead of fighting the case, she took a disability retirement as a sort of plea bargin. (Her disability was ascribed to "mental distress.") Unlike my father, who suffered outside the school environment, my mother thrived. She was free now to follow the path of her talents, and immediantly found a job at the National Lawyer's Guild, a Party front, where she became the executive secretary in its chief, Royal France.

David Horowitz, Radical Son, p.69

The revelations of Soviet anti-Semitism crushed the faith of many Jewish radicals in the United States who began to search for new gods, as David did, becoming an anti-Stalinist founder of the "New Left." Lazar Kagonvich's Jewish nephew in his autobiography of Kagonvich quotes Kagonvich bragging that Stalin was poisoned to save the Jews.

Now the poet was fighting for his life. The cause of his danger was Stalin's latest purge. Since the 1930s, when Stalin first instituted the Terror, wave upon wave of internal "enemies" had been disposed of in the chambers of the secret police. War had interrupted the slaughter, but when it was over the killing resumed. Lifting a page out of Hitler's book, Stalin decided to launch his last liquidation campaign against the Jews. It began without warning the winter of 1948 with the killing of a friend and colleague of Feffer, the actor Solomon Mikhoels. An alleged plot to murder the Soviet leader was used as the pretext for a full-scale pogrom. As the new persecutions got under way, Jews began to vanish into the vast concentration camp system that Stalin had built along with the other construction feats of the socialist state. Among those arrested was Feffer.

David Horowitz, Radical Son, p.74

More about the secret world. . .notice how Horowitz mentions "my parents and their friends."

Underneath the ordinary surfaces of their lives, my parents and their friends thought of themselves as secret agents. The mission they had undertaken, and about which they could not speak freely to anyone but each other, was not just an idea to them. It was more important to their sense of themselves than anything else they did. Nor were its tasks of a kind they could attend or ignore, depending on their moods. They were more like the obligations of a religious faith. Except that their faith was secular, and the millennium they awaited was being instituted, at that moment, in the very country that had become America's enemy

Notice Horowitz here fingering the composition of his parent's circle of friends. .

Harold was the only person I knew who was divorced. His first wife, Lucy Robison, was a concert pianist and friend of my mother's who remained close to our family afterwards. Later, he remarried Nancy Clemens, a photographer who was kind to me and took our family portrait. *But Nancy was not a New Yorker, not Jewish, and not political. I didn't know anyone else in our circle like her. ***

David Horowitz, Radical Son, p.77

Revelations of Soviet anti-Semitism cause a great schism within the faith of the Jewish radicals. . .

The schism had a dimension that reached far beyond our family circle. A month earlier, the Times had published a report from the Kremlin describing a secret speech by the new Soviet premier, Nikita Krushchev. It had been smuggled out of the Kremlin by the Mossad, the Israeli secret service. The speech made headlines all over the world because it was about crimes that Stalin had committed. Until then, Communists and progressives everywhere had denied such crimes ever took place, and had denounced the reports as "anti-Soviet" propaganda. Over the next months the story was confirmed, even by Communist sources, and in June the full text was published in the Times, and then in the Daily Worker itself.

David Horowitz, Radical Son, p.83

The Krushchev report devastates his parents. .

The publication of the Krushchev Report was probably the greatest blow struck against the Soviet Empire during the entire Cold War. When my parents and their friends opened the morning Times and read its text, their world collapsed - and along with it their will to struggle. If the document was true, almost everything they had said and believed was false. Their secret mission had led them into waters so deep that its tide had overwhelmed them, taking with it the very meaning of their lives.

David Horowitz, Radical Son, p.84

The great revelations of Soviet anti-Semitism shattered the faith of many American Jews, at this point, many of them jumped from outright Communism and Trotskyism to the New Left eventually hopping down the lilypads to Neoconservatism. The Krushchev Report was so devastating the membership of the Communist Party USA dropped by two-thirds, not suprising, since it was always overwhelmingly Jewish in its composition. . .

In the American community of the faithful, the Khrushchev Report was divisive force. Forty-year friendships disintegrated overnight, and even marriages dissolved as one partner would decide to quit the Party, the other to keep its faith. The very future of American Communism was put in doubt as activists deserted its ranks and were cut off by those they left behind. In the two years that followed, more than two-thirds of the Party membership. One poignant testimony of excommunication was given by a Party leader's wife to the writer Vivian Gornick, who included it in her book The Romance of American Communism:

The morning after we quit I went to the grocery store to buy some milk and bread and I ran into a Party member on the street. When he saw me coming toward him he veered in his tracks and crossed the street. . .I had become - literally overnight - non-existent. The only people who reamined our friends were the people who quit with us; at the same moment, in the same way, over the same issues, Everyone else disappeared.