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, a good friend of her father's.
Political career
Aptheker was a delegate to the June 1964 founding convention of the W.E.B. DuBois Clubs, a Communist Party-sponsored youth organization, held in San Francisco.
Aptheker was a member of the governing National Committee of the CPUSA and was remembered by California party leader Dorothy Healey in her 1990 memoir as "one of the liveliest of the young people who rose to prominence in the party in the 1960s and also one of the warmest human beings I've ever met."
In 1968, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia divided the leadership of the CPUSA, with a majority of the National Committee, headed by party leader Gus Hall, backing the intervention of Soviet tanks into Czechoslovakian internal affairs. A meeting of the National Committee held over the Labor Day weekend backed Hall by a margin of five-to-one. Bettina Aptheker denounced the invasion, however, and voted with the minority ... standing in opposition to her father Herbert, one of the CPUSA's leading intellectuals.
During the 1970s, Aptheker was actively involved in the high-profile trial of Angela Davis, a long-time friend.
Academic career
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 as a leading activist in the W.E.B. DuBois Club there.
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 teaching in the University of California at Santa Cruz Feminist Studies department since 1980.
Family
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. Dr. Jack Kurzweil
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. Her charges are based on recovered memory and dissociation and so have been called into doubt by some. Mark Rosenzweig writes "the truth about Herbert and Bettina is inaccessible to us." 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".)
