Allan Kolski Horwitz (born 1952) is a Johannesburg-based South African writer, poet, and trade union organizer. Born into a Jewish family in Vryburg, he studied political philosophy and literature at the University of Cape Town. After living abroad in the Middle East, Europe, and North America between 1974 and 1985, he returned to South Africa in 1986 to participate in local labor and anti-apartheid organizing.
Horwitz served for over two decades as an organizer for the South African Commercial, Catering and Allied Workers Union (SACCAWU). In the cultural sector, he was active in the Congress of South African Writers (COSAW) and co-founded the Botsotso Cultural Park, a writer-led collective, performance ensemble, and independent press established in the 1990s. His poetry, fiction, and dramatic works frequently address labor rights, urban class conflict, and social inequality in post-apartheid South Africa.
A member of South African Jews for a Free Palestine (SAJFP), Horwitz actively critiques Israeli government policies in the Occupied Territories and opposes the stance of the South African Zionist Federation (SAZF) and the South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD). In a May 2018 opinion piece published in Politicsweb, titled “Isie Maisels, BDS and the SAJBD: A reply,” Horwitz defended the South African government’s decision to downgrade its diplomatic presence in Tel Aviv and expressed support for the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement:
“In conclusion, if some Jewish South Africans feel aggrieved by our government applying BDS and down-scaling our relations with Israel so as to isolate its government then it can only be because they support apartheid in Israel. Israel shames Jews and Jewish history by its actions and South Africa, despite our own recent foreign policy zig-zags, can get back on track as a moral force by sending this signal to the world and showing solidarity with an oppressed people.”