Zoia Horn

Zoia Horn
Zoia Horn at the Internet Archive in 2010
Born	Zoia Markovna Polisar (1918-03-14)March 14, 1918 Odessa, Ukraine
Died	July 12, 2014(2014-07-12) (aged 96) Oakland, California, United States
Education	Brooklyn College & Pratt Institute Library School
Occupation	Librarian and Freedom of speech activist
Spouse(s)	R. Dean Galloway (1971)
Awards	Robert B. Downs Intellectual Freedom Award (2002), Jackie Eurbanks Memorial Award (2002)

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.

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 protestors 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.

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.