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Jewish World Review April 29, 1999/ 13 Iyar, 5759
Robert Leiter
Drawn from Horowitz's column of Jan. 18, 1999 in the
internet magazine Salon and printed in American Enterprise as a sidebar to
a section on "Untruth In Academe," the piece focuses on some little known
facts of Friedan's early life.
"What is it with progressives?" Horowitz, himself a former '60s' radical,
asks. "Why do they feel the need to lie so relentlessly about who they are?"
The columnist then notes that in the new biography, Betty Friedan and the
Making of the Feminine Mystique, Daniel Horowitz, a Smith College professor
(and no relation to David Horowitz), proves conclusively that Friedan,
who's always portrayed herself as "a typical suburban housewife" until she
began writing her groundbreaking book, was actually "nothing of the kind."
Under her maiden name, Betty Goldstein, she was in fact "an activist and
professional propagandist for the Communist Left for over a decade before
the publication of The Feminine Mystique."
The column continues: "Professor Horowitz documents that Friedan was, from
her college days until her mid-30s, a Stalinist Marxist, a political
intimate of leaders of American Communists, and for a time the lover of a
young Communist physicist working on atomic bomb projects with J. Robert
Oppenheimer. Her famous description of America's suburban family household
as 'a comfortable concentration camp' therefore had more to do with her
Marxist hatred for America than with any of her actual experience as a
housewife or mother. (Her husband, Carl, also a leftist, once complained
that his wife 'was in the world during the whole marriage,' had a full-time
maid, and 'seldom was a wife and a mother.')"
David Horowitz then goes on to discuss other examples of such left-wing
personal revisionism. He admits that he understands why people like Friedan
and his other subjects lied in the McCarthy period - they actually had
something to hide. But what he doesn't understand is why these people and
their children continue to lie to this day.
"The reason is this: The truth is too embarrassing. Imagine what it would
be like for Betty Friedan as a Jew to admit that she opposed America's
entry into the war against Hitler because her Party told her that it was
just an inter-imperialist fracas? Imagine what it would be like for
America's premier feminist to acknowledge that well into her 30s she
thought Stalin was the Father of the Peoples, and that the United States
was an evil empire, and that her interest in women's liberation was just a
subtext of her real desire to create a Soviet America. No, those kinds of
revelations don't help a person who is concerned about her public image.
"The example of Betty Friedan," the columnist concludes, "should be a
wake-up call to the rest of us to insist that people be candid about their
politics and about calling things by their right names."
Long live David Horowitz!
R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR., editor of The American Spectator magazine, has
given this year's J. Gordon Coogler Award for the worst book of the year to
Harvard law professor Alan M. Dershowitz's Sexual McCarthyism, a critique
of the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton. I couldn't agree
with him more.
An added benefit of the prize is that Tyrrell's comments accompanying the
announcement make an important point - Dershowitz's use of the term
"McCarthyism" is totally specious.
"True McCarthyism," Tyrrell writes, "is defined as a personal attack on
elements deemed subversive through indiscriminate charges that are usually
unsubstantiated. But the charges made against Clinton have been fulsomely
substantiated," beginning with the president's own admission of an improper
relationship with Miss Lewinsky.
It's always refreshing to have the air cleared --- and twice in one week!
I CAN'T THINK of when I've heard more fanfare, from the publisher and the
media, for a first book of stories than what's accompanied the publication
of Nathan Englander's For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, recently out from
Knopf. The promotional fervor has been intense, the first printing
considerable, and there has been talk of a six-figure advance.
The only writer in recent memory similarly greeted - with praise, though
not with money, if memory serves right - was Ann Beattie,. who
interestingly enough provides a blurb in the promotional material for
Englander's book.
Call me a spoiled sport, but I don't agree with any of this. Englander's
stories seem to me totally contrived, in a manner that's come to be
associated with the major writing programs in this country.
(It's not
surprising to discover that Englander is a graduate of the University of
Iowa Writers' Workshop).
All of the stories in the collection have more to
do with literature than life - everything imagined rather than felt -
whether it's in "The Gilgul of Park Avenue," where the WASPy main character
suddenly realizes in the course of a Manhattan taxi ride that he has a
Jewish "neshama," or the title story in which a sexually frustrated husband
is told by his rabbi to take solace in a prostitute.
Englander who was raised in a modern Orthodox household told the Forward
last week that's he's been doing everything in his power to escape the
fold. His stories, which seem to give us an insider's view of Orthodox
Judaism, work on the premise of turning the tables on their pious
characters in ways that will compromise them. This may tickle left-liberal
reviewers and book editors to no end, but I find it lifeless on the page
and endlessly
To tell the truth
Horowitz
AS PART OF A WIDE-RANGING discussion of lying in public life, published as
a cover story in the May/June issue of American Enterprise magazine, David
Horowitz contributes some eye-opening disclosures about pioneering feminist
Betty Friedan.
"The best story collection I've read in ages," Beattie blurbs. "Every so
often there's a new voice that entirely revitalizes the short story. It
happened with Richard Ford, and with Denis Johnson, and with Thom Jones.
It's happening again with Nathan Englander, whose precise, funny,
heart-breaking, well-controlled but never contrived stories open a window
on a fascinating landscape we might never have known was there."
Robert Leiter is Literary Editor of the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent.
3/17/99: Beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder