Family
Horowitz was born to a Secular Jewish family in Forest Hills, New York City. His parents, Phil and Blanche Horowitz, were high school teachers. Phil taught English and Blanche taught stenography. Horowitz majored in English and received a BA from Columbia University in 1959 and a master's degree in English literature at University of California, Berkeley.
Phil and Blanche Horowitz were long-standing members of the American Communist Party and avid supporters of Joseph Stalin.
According to Horowitz,
"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 except with 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. It was this fact that made their ordinary lives precarious and their secrecy necessary. If they lived under a cloud of suspicion, it was the result of more than just their political passions. The dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima had created a terror in the minds of ordinary people. Newspapers reported on American spy rings working to steal atomic secrets for the Soviet state. When people read these stories, they inevitably thought of progressives like us. And so did we ourselves. Even if we never encountered a Soviet agent or engaged in a single illegal act, each of us knew that our commitment to socialism implied the obligation to commit treason, too."
After the death of Stalin in 1953, Phil Horowitz, commenting on how the numerous official titles held by Stalin had to be divided among his successors, told his son, "You see what a genius Stalin was. It took five men to replace him."
Read more about this topic: David Horowitz
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