Zoia Horn

Horn died on July 12, 2014 at her home in Oakland, California at the age of 96.

In 1995, Horn published her memoirs, titled ZOIA! Memoirs of Zoia Horn, Battler for the People's Right to Know. In its review of Horn's memoirs, the Library Journal called Horn "a courageous crusader." Horn continued to speak out on issues of intellectual freedom, including writing an article on a small-city Oklahoma librarian who was dismissed by the City Commission after being accused of supplying "subversive" materials (including subscriptions to The Nation, The New Republic and Soviet Russia Today) at the library. She also defended a gay librarian in Oakland, California who was "attacked for creating a display of gay library materials," and speaking out against the Patriot Act. She spoke in opposition to libraries' proposals to charge fees, arguing that the "payment of any fee in a public library" resembles censorship in creating "barriers to information access." In 2002, she was awarded the Jackie Eubanks Memorial Award and the Robert B. Downs Intellectual Freedom Award.

In January 1971, Horn was contacted by the FBI, seeking evidence involving Philip Berrigan. Berrigan, a Roman Catholic priest and anti-war activist, was serving a sentence in a nearby federal prison for burning draft files concerning the Vietnam War. Berrigan, from his jail cell, was alleged to be plotting along with six other individuals (Harrisburg Seven), to blow up heating tunnels beneath Washington, D.C., and to kidnap Henry Kissinger, the national security adviser to President Richard Nixon.

In 1971, Horn proposed a resolution for the ALA to assert "freedoms to think, communicate, and discuss..are essential elements of intellectual freedom, that these freedoms have been threatened by our federal government's use of informers, electronic surveillance, grand juries, and indictments."

In 1964, she won a Humanities Fellowship to the University of Oregon where she became active in librarians' organizations and conferences. She began working at the UCLA library in 1965, where she participated in daily vigils protesting the Vietnam War. She later recalled that she attended the protests "always wearing good shoes and gloves, the proper lady-librarian," hoping to show that war protesters were "ordinary folks." In 1968, she was hired as Head of the Reference Department at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where she continued to work with peace activists.

Zoia Markovna Horn (née Polisar; March 14, 1918 – July 12, 2014), born in Ukraine, became in 1972 the first United States librarian to be jailed for refusing to share information as a matter of conscience. Horn, an outspoken member of the American Library Association's Intellectual Freedom Committee, worked at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania in the early 1970s. Horn was jailed for nearly three weeks for contempt of court after refusing to testify for the prosecution in the 1972 conspiracy trial of the "Harrisburg Seven" anti-war activists.

Horn was born in Odessa, Ukraine in 1918, to a secular Jewish family of small businessmen and shopkeepers. She emigrated with her family to Canada in 1926 at the age of 8, then to New York City where she attended Brooklyn College and the Pratt Institute Library School. She first began working at a library in 1942.