And what a list of luminaries it is, the people who talked to David! One of his most treasured possessions was the series of letters he exchanged with King Abdullah of Jordan before he was assassinated by an Arab fanatic in 1951. They disagreed on many points, of course, but always with a mutual human respect. “It is because Abdullah was the kind of man who would agree to engage in dialogue with a Jewish journalist that he was assassinated,” David once said to me with a sigh when I was very young.
It was this almost spellbinding tolerance and friendliness that insured that no matter what petty disputes divided people at the UN or what inhuman arrogance decided that certain people would not even talk to others, everyone would always talk to David. And there was a powerful, human reason why this was so in the Tower of Babel on the East River.
“In all my forty years and more of knowing him, not once did he ever raise his voice in anger,” says my father. “That was the reason why all of the other correspondents, even those from the Arab world who would refuse to attend a press conference given by an Israeli diplomat, would come to see, and talk with, David.”
Catastrophe and Tragedy
It has been said that pain is inevitable in life, and that it is what you do with it that matters. It is perhaps the measure of the man that David Horowitz’s essentially transcendent nature proceeded from the tragedy that marked his early middle age and took his first family away from him — the Holocaust.
Due to an unforeseen series of accidents David’s first wife and little son were trapped in Europe at the outbreak of World War II, and perished in the death camps. This personal tragedy intersected not only with the larger one of his people but with that of all mankind. David, who had been born in the halcyon years before World War I and had always maintained his faith in human progress, had by the time he was 42 witnessed and personally suffered two successive, incomprehensible world catastrophes in which millions of innocents of all ethnicities perished — general disasters compounded by the attempted extermination of his own people.
How is it that someone who had endured this could never once raise his voice in anger? How could someone covered in the ashes of his world emerge calmly offering his point of view to those who not only continued to attack his people, but his very conception of mankind? The answer can only lie in his strong belief in G-d and the ultimate beneficence and beauty of G-d’s creation, summed up by David’s lifelong motto: “Mosaic Law for One World.”
Quite the opposite from being an affirmation of Jewish theological supremacy, this phrase was just like every other word and deed in David’s life — the opening of a dialogue. Indeed, he was the least dogmatic of men, someone who strongly cherished his friendships with Christians who shared his passion for biblical exploration and interpretation. At his funeral his close friend Dr. James Tabor, professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, noted that David worked throughout his life ‘to promote the ideal that the Jews should be a light to the nations.’
And when one speaks of the nations, David meant it in the widest sense, for his engagement with others in the corridors of Turtle Bay extended to the representatives of the remotest corners of the earth. Some of the earliest memories of my childhood are those of David Horowitz engaged in earnest conversation, either in his office, in the United Nations Correspondent’s Association (UNCA) Club, or in the hallways with men and women of all colors and modes of dress.
