David Horowitz

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.

David Joel Horowitz (born January 10, 1939 ) is an American conservative writer and activist.

He is a founder and president of the right-wing 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.

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.

From 1956 to 1975, Horowitz was an outspoken adherent of the New Left.

He later rejected progressive ideas and became a defender of neoconservatism.

They left the party after Khrushchev published his report in 1956 about the crimes Stalin committed and 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.

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.

Horowitz later portrayed Newton as equal parts gangster, terrorist, intellectual and media celebrity.

As part of their work together, Horowitz helped raise money for, and assisted the Panthers with, the running of a school for poor children in Oakland.

He recommended that Newton hire Betty Van Patter as bookkeeper; she was then working for Ramparts.

In December 1974, Van Patter's body was found floating in San Francisco Harbor; she had been murdered.

It is widely believed that the Panthers were responsible for her murder, a belief also held by Horowitz.

In 1976, Horowitz was a "founding sponsor" of James Weinstein's magazine In These Times.

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.

Horowitz recounted his ideological journey in a series of retrospective books, culminating with his 1996 memoir Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey.

Born in the Forest Hills neighborhood of Queens, a borough of New York City, Horowitz is the son of Jewish high school teachers Phil and Blanche Horowitz.

His father taught English and his mother taught stenography.