Noam Chomsky

Chomsky was born on December 7, 1928, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Jewish parents whose backgrounds shaped his intellectual and cultural formation from the outset.[6] His father, William Chomsky, was a Hebrew scholar and member of the Industrial Workers of the World who had emigrated from Ukraine; his mother, Elsie Chomsky, came from what is now Belarus and became a prominent Jewish educator in Philadelphia.[1][6] The family spoke English and Hebrew at home rather than Yiddish, embedding Chomsky in a Hebrew-nationalist cultural world from early childhood.[1]

His parents sent him to the Oak Lane Country Day School, a progressive K–8 private school connected with Temple University.[6] In 1943, Chomsky attended the first summer of Camp Massad, a Hebrew-language overnight camp in the Pocono Mountains that emphasized daily Hebrew use, Jewish observance, the arts, and Zionism.[6] He later graduated from Central High School before enrolling at the University of Pennsylvania.[6]

At age ten, Chomsky wrote an article about the spread of fascism following the fall of Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War — an experience associated with his early identification with anarchist politics.[1] By eighteen he was already articulating views about the future of Palestine that differed from those of many of his peers: in the spring 1947 issue of the Gratz student publication HaMitorer, he published a Hebrew-language article arguing against partition into Jewish and Arab states and advocating a single binational state on economic and political grounds.[6] The article included the argument: "Economic control is far more important than political control. We can't attain economic control — that is to say, the possibility of flourishing and developing — in a partitioned land."[6] Chomsky wrote as part of the Jewish community, using "we" while attempting to persuade his readers from within that community.[6]

He describes growing up with a deep interest in the revival of Hebrew culture associated with the Jewish settlement of Palestine.[3] He says he was on the fringes of the left wing of the Zionist youth movement but did not join because of political disagreements, and that he was attracted to the possibility of creating a form of libertarian socialism in the Middle East.[3] He also states that he considered a socialist binationalist position correct in 1947 and continued to hold that view, presenting socialist binationalism as the best hope for reconciling the claims of Jews and Arabs in the former Palestine, based on the principle that neither people should dominate or be governed by the other.[3]

Chomsky began studying philosophy and linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania in 1945, where he worked with philosophers C. West Churchman and Nelson Goodman and with linguist Zellig Harris.[1] He received a B.A. in 1949, an M.A. in 1951, and a Ph.D. in linguistics in 1955.[1] He completed graduate work while a Harvard Junior Fellow from 1951 to 1954, a fellowship with no teaching responsibilities that gave him latitude to think and write.[2][6]

His professional profile combined a University of Pennsylvania Ph.D., service on the MIT faculty, and the production of scholarly and popular political works.[7] By age eighteen, he had already demonstrated the intellectual ability that later made him a world-renowned linguistics scholar and public intellectual.[6]

Chomsky joined MIT in 1955 and became a full professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics in 1961.[1] He held the Ferrari P. Ward Professorship of Modern Languages and Linguistics from 1966 to 1976, and was appointed Institute Professor in 1976 — the institution's highest academic rank.[1] He subsequently held an emeritus position in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, with MIT recognizing his tenure as spanning more than fifty years.[1] In 2017, he joined the University of Arizona's College of Social and Behavioral Sciences.[8]

The centerpiece of Chomsky's scientific achievement is the development, beginning in the 1950s, of generative grammar — a theory that has undergone multiple revisions and exerted a major influence on linguistics.[1] His 1957 book Syntactic Structures is identified as his best-known linguistic work and is widely credited with revolutionizing modern linguistics.[1][3] The opening of Syntactic Structures states that "syntactical investigation of a given language has as its goal the construction of a device for producing the sentences of the language under investigation" — a framing that shifted the field's conception of what a linguistic theory should accomplish.[2]

Chomsky's approach challenged the behaviorist view that language is acquired principally through imitation, training, and stimulus-response conditioning.[2] He argued that human beings possess an innate capacity for language and distinguished between surface structures — the actual words and arrangements speakers use — and deep structures, which carry underlying meaning.[2] His transformational-generative grammar sought to explain how speakers can understand and produce an unlimited number of sentences they may never previously have heard, a phenomenon he treated as evidence of a universal, biologically grounded language faculty.[2]

His 1959 review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior directly challenged behaviorist approaches to language and behavior and contributed substantially to the cognitive revolution in psychology.[1] Articles published between 1963 and 1972 reflected the growing influence of what one government educational publication described as his "revolutionary ideas on the innateness of language," even as Chomsky himself did not focus specifically on the relationship between his linguistic theories and English-language teaching.[9] Teachers and researchers nonetheless applied his ideas to debates about linguistics, language teaching, rote drills, and the audio-lingual method.[9]

Beyond generative grammar, Chomsky is credited with establishing the Chomsky hierarchy, a classification of formal languages according to their generative power, and with developing universal grammar and the Chomsky–Schützenberger theory.[1][4] His work influenced not only linguistics but also computer science, mathematics, and psychology.[4] He published more than seventy books and more than one thousand articles across linguistics, philosophy, politics, and psychology, and received the Kyoto Prize in 1988 — described as the Japanese equivalent of the Nobel Prize.[5]

Chomsky became a prominent opponent of the Vietnam War with the February 1967 publication of "The Responsibility of Intellectuals."[1] The essay declared: "It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies."[2] It has been described as "the single most influential piece of anti-war literature" of the Vietnam War period, and its publication brought Chomsky onto the U.S. political scene as a leading dissident.[10] His 1969 book American Power and the New Mandarins collected essays on the war and established him as a major American dissenter.[1]

His antiwar activity extended well beyond writing. Chomsky spoke at antiwar teach-ins and demonstrations, called on opponents of the war to withhold part of their income taxes, and became involved with the antiwar organization Resist.[2] He signed the "Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority" and visited North Vietnam in an action described by one source as illegal.[6] In October 1967, he was arrested with other antiwar activists including Benjamin Spock and Norman Mailer.[2] In January 1968, the Justice Department indicted Spock and others for conspiracy to aid draft resisters; Chomsky was listed as an unindicted co-conspirator — a designation that caused his mother serious concern because it exposed him to the possibility of years in prison.[2][6]

From opposition to Vietnam, Chomsky extended his critique to what he characterized as U.S. imperialism more broadly. He criticized American foreign policy and corporate power and, in a co-authored 1988 book, developed a systematic analytical framework for studying news media. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, written with Edward Herman, formulated a propaganda-model approach to studying how news organizations structure public understanding.[4] His 2016 book Who Rules the World?, published by Metropolitan Books, examined post-9/11 U.S. policy, discussing drone assassinations, nuclear warfare, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, the Israel-Palestine conflict, and what he characterized as the insulation of U.S. elites from democratic constraints.[11]

Chomsky's engagement with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is both long-standing and deeply personal. He has described himself as having grown up with a deep interest in the revival of Hebrew culture associated with the Jewish settlement of Palestine, and says he spent several very happy months working on a kibbutz after 1948 while seriously considering returning permanently to Israel.[3] He maintained close personal connections with friends who lived in kibbutzim or elsewhere in Israel.[3] In a separate account, Encyclopedia.com states that he and his wife lived for six weeks on an Israeli kibbutz in 1953, and that he later described himself as uncomfortable with the experiment's ideological rigidity.[2]

His political position on the conflict developed early. A Hebrew-language article he published in 1947 already argued against partition and in favor of a binational state.[6] He states that he considered socialist binationalism the correct position in 1947 and continued to hold it thereafter, on the grounds that neither Jews nor Arabs should dominate or be governed by the other.[3] During the 1967 Six-Day War, Chomsky writes that he personally believed Israel faced a real threat of genocide and responded with what he called "virtually uncritical support for Israel" during what appeared to be a desperate moment — though he later judged that assessment of the facts to have been "dubious at best."[3]

His major books on the subject include Peace in the Middle East? (1974) and Fateful Triangle: The U.S., Israel and the Palestinians (1983, revised in 1999).[2] In 2015, he co-authored On Palestine with historian Ilan Pappé — a 215-page volume cataloged by the National Library of Israel that included dialogues on the past, present, and future, discussions of Israel and the United States, and chapters with titles such as "Gaza's torment, Israel's crimes, our responsibilities" and "The futility and immorality of partition in Palestine."[12]

Chomsky's publicly stated positions on Israeli policies have been pointed and wide-ranging. At a 2010 Israeli Occupation Awareness Week at Brandeis University, he accused Israel of ethnic cleansing and described Israeli policy as apartheid.[13] He also characterized the situation in the occupied West Bank — known by its original, indigenous Jewish name of Judea and Samaria — as worse than South Africa's apartheid system, while rejecting that label for Israeli policies inside Israel and alleging severe discrimination against non-Jews.[14]

He opposed a boycott of Israel as an ineffective tactic that he argued could harm the Palestinian cause.[14] Writing in The Nation, he argued that the demand for a right of return for Palestinian refugees had not gained significant international support and that BDS tactics should be evaluated according to whether they had succeeded or failed.[14] He also questioned academic boycotts, writing that boycotting Tel Aviv University because of Israeli human-rights violations would raise the question of why Harvard should not be boycotted for what he characterized as greater violations by the United States.[14]

During the 1960s, his increasingly critical views of Israel and the Middle East became objectionable to people in the strongly Zionist and Hebrew-nationalist circles in which his parents moved.[6] His mother, Elsie Chomsky — an ardent Hebrew nationalist and Zionist by the account of one study — defended him against critics and argued that people misunderstood his views.[6] His visibility on these questions made him an internationally prominent scholar and public intellectual who spoke to packed halls, even as critics argued his public positions were actively harming Israel.[6]

Chomsky's intellectual output across more than seven decades spans two largely separate domains: formal linguistics and political commentary.[2]

In linguistics, Syntactic Structures (1957) became an early statement of the program of generative grammar. The Chomsky hierarchy classified formal languages according to the generative power of different types of grammars and influenced theoretical computer science.[4] His 1959 critique of Skinner's Verbal Behavior contributed to the cognitive revolution in psychology by challenging stimulus-response models of language acquisition.[1] His later linguistic works included The Minimalist Program and New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind.[3]

In political writing, the 1967 essay "The Responsibility of Intellectuals" gave him a platform that extended far beyond academia.[2][10] The New York Times has described him as an "exploder of received truths."[3] His political books include American Power and the New Mandarins (1969), Manufacturing Consent (1988), 9-11, Rogue States, Understanding Power, and Fateful Triangle.[1][3] Later books included On Palestine (2015) and Who Rules the World? (2016).[11][12] Across his fields, he published more than seventy books and more than one thousand articles and received the Kyoto Prize in 1988.[5]

His health became a matter of public attention in 2024, when his wife denied reports of his death and confirmed that he had been hospitalized in Brazil while recovering from a stroke suffered a year earlier.[8] The couple had maintained a residence in Brazil since 2015.[8]

Chomsky's political positions have generated sustained controversy, particularly in relation to Israel, terrorism, and U.S. foreign policy.

During an eight-day visit to Lebanon beginning May 8, 2006, Chomsky met leaders of the terrorist organization Hezbollah and appeared on Hezbollah's Al-Manar television.[15] Another report says he met Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, spoke at the American University of Beirut, and visited Al-Khiyam Prison, where he reportedly commended prisoners' perseverance, compared the facility with Guantanamo, and defended Hezbollah's retention of arms as a deterrent pending a general political settlement.[16] CAMERA characterized his conduct and statements during the visit as supportive of Hezbollah.[15] The Jewish Virtual Library reports critics' allegations that he tolerated violence against Israelis and supported arming Hezbollah; Chomsky denied accusations that he was antisemitic.[1]

In a May 2006 interview, Chomsky said he was "very much opposed to Hamas' policies in almost every respect," but argued that the terrorist organization's policies were more conducive to a peaceful settlement than those of the United States or Israel.[15][17] He said Hamas had called for a long-term truce on the pre-June 1967 border and portrayed a two-state settlement on that border as a long-standing international consensus.[17] He also argued that the United States and Israel did not meet the recognition and nonviolence demands they placed on Hamas.[17]

Chomsky described the September 11, 2001 attacks as "one of the most horrifying terrorist atrocities ever" and "probably the single worst terrorist atrocity," while arguing that they should be placed in a broader historical context.[17] He contrasted them with the September 11, 1973 coup in Chile, which he characterized as a U.S.-backed installation of a military dictatorship.[17] After Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011, Chomsky questioned whether bin Laden had been more than a "suspect" in the attacks and used comparisons intended to illustrate what he considered a double standard in U.S. conduct. Critics at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and elsewhere objected to those comparisons.[18]

Criticism of Chomsky's Middle East writings has also come from within the Jewish scholarly community. A Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs review discusses a chapter by Paul Bogdanor that characterizes Chomsky's writings as "diatribes" bearing the hallmarks of "massive falsifications of facts, evidence, sources and statistics."[19] These are Bogdanor's characterizations as presented by the review, not independently established findings.

Debate over simple political labels also appears in biographical accounts: a study of his mother records that detractors believed his positions harmed Israel and that she defended him as misunderstood, while Chomsky's own accounts emphasize his Jewish cultural ties and long engagement with Israeli society.[6][3]