Seeking a Life in the Holy Land

Listen up, liberals and leftists: The personal is not always political. Ignore the name David Horowitz on the cover of "A Cracking of the Heart," forget his politics, and plunge into this tender-hearted, yet disturbing tribute to a daughter's life and values so different from the author's own. Sarah Horowitz was born in 1964 with Turner's Syndrome, a congenital chromosomal disorder, which burdened her with a variety of handicaps, including physical imbalance, early arthritis of the hips, severe hearing loss and a weak heart. She faced physical infirmities which would have daunted and depressed just about anyone; but Sarah, whose physical growth stopped short of five feet, grew to be a giant of hopefulness and generosity of spirit, apparently inspiring everyone who knew her. And she packed more than a lifetime's worth of experience, friends, projects, travel and writing into her mere 44 years on earth.

She was a seeker, but not just after spiritual enlightenment, and her various interests led her to study many things, including psychology and music. Wanting to be a writer, like her father, Sarah somehow found enough time between her other myriad activities to write and publish arresting paid-for-pieces on a range of subjects, and even to do public readings of her poems. But apparently, performing mitzvot, like feeding the homeless, and reading to hospital patients, and promoting social justice were most important to her. And in the last decade of her life she pursued these goals in an explicitly Jewish context with the guidance of her friend and spiritual leader, Rabbi Alan Lew of California.

Even her truculent right-wing father, who went from being a "red diaper baby" to a 60s radical, then did an about-face and became a leading American ultra-conservative beginning in the 70s, came to see Sarah in her activities and his conversations with her as one of the 36 truly righteous individuals living in our universe at any one time and upon whom, according to Jewish tradition, the continued existence of the world depends. Instead of allowing herself to be overwhelmed by the unfair hand life dealt her, Sarah showed boundless compassion for the underserved and the overlooked. And she committed herself to helping in every way she could: devoting herself to a career (income-producing, but barely sustaining ) in special education, by caring for and teaching an autistic niece, and by aiding developmentally disabled children and adults in schools, hospitals and other institutions in India, Israel, El Salvador, Africa and the United States. She also wrote letters on behalf of political prisoners, stood vigil against capital punishment and marched against war as a primary response in international relations.


Horrific political episodes

Her father did not discourage her in any of this. But then, by the time Sarah was a teenager, David Horowitz was living apart, and moderately estranged, from his daughter. He had left the household after a series of horrific political episodes in the 1970s (which he details in an earlier book, "Radical Son," published in 1997 ) drove him into personal chaos, unremitting depression and divorce.

In 1974, when Sarah was 10, Betty Van Patter, who worked as a bookkeeper for Horowitz when he was the editor of the radical magazine Ramparts, disappeared from a local pub in Berkeley. Her body was found weeks later on a San Francisco beach. Van Patter had been keeping the accounts of a school run by the Black Panther Party, for which Horowitz had raised a large sum of money. She had been involved in a contentious dispute with Panther leader Elaine Brown over financial irregularities shortly before she vanished; and although the killer was never apprehended and the case remains officially unsolved, it was widely and reasonably thought that Betty had been beaten to death by the Panthers before she could blow the whistle on the misappropriation of funds.

Yet another Berkeley radical, Fay Stender, an internationally renowned lawyer and pacifist with whom Horowitz was closely acquainted through his leftist activities, was allegedly shot by Black Panthers in 1979 when she refused to smuggle a weapon into prison to rescue Panther leader George Jackson. Stender, hit by six bullets, was permanently paralyzed. Her sense of having been betrayed, combined with her severely diminished existence, sent her into a horrendous depression that ended with her suicide. In both the Van Patter and Stender cases, the Panther leadership showed a decided lack of interest in cooperating with investigators, and apparently even warned Horowitz against asking probing questions.

That the "progressives," to whom Horowitz had devoted many years of his life, appeared to be protecting murderers not only shattered his faith in the left, but seems to have produced a crisis of the spirit that drove him 180 degrees to the right, where he has stayed ever since. In "A Cracking of the Heart," Horowitz tells us about his earlier published explanation of why, in 1980, he voted for Ronald Reagan for U.S. president, and as Sarah put it, went over to "the dark side."

Casting his ballot for the Republicans was a way, he said, of finally saying farewell to radicalism and its romance with what he calls "corrupt Third Worldism," to its casual tolerance of Soviet totalitarianism and to the self-aggrandizing anti-Americanism "which is the New Left's bequest to mainstream politics."

For the left-leaning Sarah, it was not as disturbing to read her father's far-right positions in a magazine as to have him spew them at her and other members of the Horowitz clan at a relatively rare family get-together one evening in a restaurant in San Francisco. Acting out of his own bitterness and grief, and perhaps also out of fear of losing his daughter entirely to the left he now despised, Horowitz self-righteously declaimed that the purpose of anti-war movements was to disarm democracies and encourage their enemies. But during his restaurant meal tirade, he soon noticed that Sarah's eyes had begun to brim with tears and that her face trembled as though a colossal weight was pushing relentlessly down upon her. Sarah's "expression in that instant was one of such mute and irremediable suffering" that the distress of it, Horowitz writes, continues to haunt him and changed forever the way he related to his daughter over matters political.


Meeting of the minds?

Horowitz was compelled to write a memoir about his daughter, about what she was able to achieve against great odds, and about the efforts of father and child to understand and reach each other, and it deserves an audience. In the process of putting the book together, Horowitz says he learned even more about Sarah's courage and righteousness (especially when, after she died, he went through her journals and her unpublished stories, essays and poems, some of which he reproduces here ) that led him to reflect "ruefully" on the ways he had failed to appreciate or support her sufficiently. Horowitz even goes so far as to say that Sarah had not only challenged his personal and political certitude while she was alive, but also by what she left behind in her papers. His new book, however, while profoundly moving, doesn't quite back up that claim. Horowitz's confrontational and abrasive style may have changed, but only in the way he conversed with his daughter. The substance of his reactionary thinking was barely touched. It may look as if he and Sarah had had a meeting of the minds in the years before her 2008 death, but in actuality Horowitz was seeing only the side of his daughter with which he had always been in sympathy.

When the two of them talked about capital punishment, for example, Horowitz was relieved to know that Sarah's oppositional stand was not based on an automatic insistence on the innocence of the convicted. And when he defended the market system in conversations with her about minimum wages and sweatshops in the underdeveloped world, he was happy that she looked thoughtful and did not immediately reject his argument. Horowitz was also delighted to learn that Sarah knew that the left was not always a friend to freedom nor always fair in its criticism of Israel, a nation whose "resilience of spirit" they both admired. Moreover, when Sarah protested against war, she did so, Horowitz realized, not as a "starry-eyed" pacifist, but as one who recognized the existence of terror, tyranny and evil, and the right to self-defense against them.

All of this leads Horowitz to conclude that he and his daughter shared "universal themes" which transcended their political differences. In this, he is only partly correct. In her politics Sarah was not obsessed with the kind of secular messianism that imbued some on the left with arrogance and self-righteousness. She knew, along with the late Rabbi Lew, that the Messiah could not be hurried. And she may not have shared with other radicals what her father calls the hubristic desire for a world "fundamentally different from the one we have been given." But it is clear that though Sarah was aware of the limits of human ability to change the world, she was impelled by the injunction of tikkun olam to do what she could to make it better. Unlike her father, who thinks the human condition obdurate and incorrigible, Sarah believed the world could be repaired and significantly improved, if not completely made over.

Horowitz, knowing Sarah's idealism was tempered by a sober realism about the limits of political movements, supported and even encouraged his daughter when she went to Iowa in early 2008 to campaign for Barack Obama. But when the first African-American ever elected to the American presidency took office less than a year after Sarah died, and only weeks before "A Cracking of the Heart" was published in October 2009, Horowitz said in his online magazine, FrontPage, that Obama had been, and still was, a radical, and that part of his agenda was to gain control for "the armies of the left" and create "slush funds" for them.

Horowitz claims in his book that it was impossible to read Sarah's material and watch her pursue justice without becoming a more compassionate person. One might think this would have taken some of the jagged edge off Horowitz's own staunch conservatism and brash rhetoric. Instead, he now tells us that the Obama gang in Washington is the most "anti-Jewish" and "the most dangerous political administration ... that we have ever seen."

It is a miracle that a book as sensitive to his daughter and to her desire to repair the world has emerged from a mind and heart as congealed as Horowitz's. He writes that Sarah taught him many important lessons, and this seems to be the case in regard to his relationship with her. It is naive, I suppose, to hope that Horowitz will apply that sensitivity to the larger political dialogue (perhaps in a sequel entitled, "An Opening of the Brain"? ). Sarah would be pleased.

Gerald Sorin, Distinguished Professor of Jewish and American Studies at the State University of New York, New Paltz, is the author of many books, including "Irving Howe: A Life of Passionate Dissent." He is currently working on a biography of the Jewish American Communist writer Howard Fast.