Bettina Aptheker (born September 13, 1944) is an American activist, author, feminist, and professor.
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Aptheker was born in North Carolina to Fay Philippa Aptheker and Herbert Aptheker, a radical activist and Marxist historian. She was raised in Brooklyn, New York. Her first job as a teenager was in the home of W. E. B. Du Bois, with whom her father was a good friend.
Aptheker obtained her undergraduate degree from the University of California, Berkeley, where she was a leader in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of the 1960s.
She completed her Master's degree at San José State University, where she later taught African-American and Women's Studies.
In the early 1980s Aptheker completed her graduate studies in the History of Consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Aptheker has been with Kate Miller, her life partner, since October 1979. They have three children (both from previous marriages), and Aptheker is a grandmother. Prior to this partnership, during her undergraduate years at UC Berkeley, Aptheker was married to fellow student and Communist Jack Kurzweil.[1] In her 2006 memoir, Intimate Politics, she claims that she was sexually molested by her father from the age of 4 to the age of 13. However, her charges are based on recovered memory and dissociation[2] and so have been called into doubt. [3] [4] For example, Mark Rosenzweig writes "the truth about Herbert and Bettina is inaccessible to us."[5] She also tells about their highly emotional reconciliation several years before his death. In addition, she claims that her father's celebrations of black resistance were attempts "to compensate for his deep shame about the way, he believed, the Jews had acted during the Holocaust" (for which she has been criticized as "possibly antisemitic"[3]).
Aptheker has been teaching in the University of California at Santa Cruz Feminist Studies department since 1980.
During the 1970s, Aptheker was actively involved in the trial of Angela Davis, a long-time friend and fellow Communist.
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