Noam Chomsky

Avram Noam Chomsky was born on December 7, 1928, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to William Chomsky and Elsie Simonofsky, both Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants. William fled the Russian Empire in 1913 to avoid conscription, working in Baltimore sweatshops and teaching at Hebrew schools before becoming principal of a Philadelphia religious school and joining the Gratz College faculty. Elsie, who also taught at that school, shared her leftist politics with her sons.

Chomsky’s only sibling, David Eli Chomsky, was a cardiologist. The brothers were raised Jewish, learned Hebrew, and discussed Zionist political theories, influenced by the writings of Ahad Ha’am. They faced antisemitism from local Irish and German communities.

Chomsky attended the Deweyite Oak Lane Country Day School and Philadelphia’s Central High School, where he excelled but disliked the rigid teaching methods, and also attended Hebrew High School at Gratz College. His parents were center-left Roosevelt Democrats, but relatives in the garment workers’ union introduced him to socialism and far-left politics. He was deeply influenced by his uncle and the Jewish leftists who debated at a New York City newsstand, and he often visited left-wing and anarchist bookstores in the city.

Chomsky developed an early interest in anarchism. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania and, during postgraduate work at the Harvard Society of Fellows, created the theory of transformational grammar, earning his doctorate in 1955. That year he began teaching at MIT, and in 1957 his landmark work Syntactic Structures made him a significant figure in linguistics, reshaping the study of language. From 1958 to 1959 he was a National Science Foundation fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study.

He developed or co-developed universal grammar, generative grammar, the Chomsky hierarchy, and the minimalist program. He played a key role in the decline of linguistic behaviorism and was especially critical of B. F. Skinner. His work in linguistics sparked the linguistics wars during the 1960s.

Chomsky has been called the father of modern linguistics and is a major figure in analytic philosophy and a founder of cognitive science. He is a laureate professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona and an institute professor emeritus at MIT. One of the most cited living authors, he has written over 150 books on linguistics, war, and politics. Since the 1960s, he has been a consistent critic of U.S. foreign policy, contemporary capitalism, and corporatocracy, becoming an influential voice on the American Left.

An outspoken opponent of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, which he viewed as American imperialism, Chomsky gained national attention in 1967 for his anti-war essay “The Responsibility of Intellectuals.” He became associated with the New Left, was arrested multiple times for activism, and was placed on President Richard Nixon’s list of political opponents. With Edward S. Herman, he articulated the propaganda model of media criticism in Manufacturing Consent and worked to expose the Indonesian occupation of East Timor. His defense of unconditional free speech, including for Holocaust denial, caused controversy in the Faurisson affair of the 1980s.

His commentary on the Cambodian genocide and the Bosnian genocide also sparked controversy. Since retiring from MIT, he has continued political activism, opposing the 2003 invasion of Iraq and supporting the Occupy movement. An anti-Zionist, he considers Israel’s treatment of Palestinians worse than South African apartheid and criticizes U.S. support for Israel.

Chomsky is widely recognized for helping spark the cognitive revolution in the human sciences, contributing a new cognitivistic framework for studying language and the mind. He remains a leading critic of U.S. foreign policy, capitalism, U.S. involvement and Israel’s role in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and mass media. His ideas continue to be highly influential in anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements.