Noam Chomsky

In 1947, Noam Chomsky became romantically involved with Carol Doris Schatz, a lady he had known since his childhood. The couple got married in 1949 and was blessed with three children. His wife was also a linguist and an education specialist who studied language acquisition in children. The couple had a long married life that lasted up to Carol’s death in 2008.

Even though he was devastated by the death of his wife, he eventually found love again, leading to his second marriage to Valeria Wasserman in 2014.

He was raised a Jew but later on he moved away from his Jewish traditions and currently identifies himself as “non-religious.”

Avram Noam Chomsky was born on December 7, 1928, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to William "Zev" Chomsky and his wife Elsie Simonofsky. His father was an Ashkenazi Jew originally from Ukraine who had migrated to the U.S. in the 1910s. Both his parents worked in education—his father as a scholar of Hebrew and his mother as a teacher.

Noam, along with his younger brother David, was raised in an intellectually stimulating environment. Several members of his extended family supported left-wing politics and the young boy was exposed to the ideals of socialism, anarchism, and Stalinism which helped to develop his own political inclination.

He attended the Central High School where he proved to be an exceptional student. He not only performed well in academics, but also actively participated in other co-curricular activities. However, he did not like the regimented method of teaching employed there.

In 1945, he entered the University of Pennsylvania where he studied philosophy, logic, and languages. During his university years, he met the Russian-born linguist Zellig Harris who kindled in the young Noam a deep interest in theoretical linguistics. Chomsky also developed interest in philosophy, thanks to the tutelage of Nelson Goodman. Chomsky received his M.A. in 1951.

On Goodman’s advice, Chomsky proceeded to the Harvard University in 1951 to work on his doctoral dissertation. He published his first academic article, ‘Systems of Syntactic Analysis’, in ‘The Journal of Symbolic Logic’ in 1952. Philosopher W. V. Quine, who was based at Harvard that time, strongly influenced Chomsky.

Noam Chomsky was appointed as an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1955. There he was required to spend considerable time on a machine translation project along with his teaching duties.

His work was much appreciated and within two years he was promoted to the position of associate professor. He also served as a visiting professor at the Columbia University in 1957-58. In 1957, he published his first book ‘Syntactic Structures’ based on a series of lectures he gave to his students at MIT.

His book presented many novel ideas that greatly impressed the senior faculty at the university and thus Chomsky and his colleague Morris Halle were asked to establish a new graduate program in linguistics. The program proved to be a huge success and attracted several brilliant students like Robert Lees, Jerry Fodor, and Jerold Katz who eventually went on to become renowned linguists in their own rights.

Chomsky was made a full professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics in 1961. By this time he had established himself as a renowned linguist which led to his appointment as plenary speaker at the Ninth International Congress of Linguists, held in 1962 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This further boosted his international reputation.

Along with his teaching career he continued to publish several influential works such as ‘Aspects of the Theory of Syntax’ (1966), ‘Topics in the Theory of Generative Grammar’ (1966), and ‘Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought’ (1966).

In the late 1960s, Noam Chomsky started getting more involved in political activism. While he had always been vocal about his left-leanings, it was only in 1967 that he publicly started speaking against the United States foreign policy. His essay title ‘The Responsibility of Intellectuals’, published in ‘The New York Review of Books’ in February 1967 vocalized his views of dissent.

In 1969, he published his first political book ‘American Power and the New Mandarins’ in which he explained in details his opposition to the Vietnam War. He published several other political books over the following years which included ‘At War with Asia’ (1971), ‘The Backroom Boys’ (1973), ‘For Reasons of State’ (1973), and ‘Peace in the Middle East?’ (1975).

He did not stop with writing; he also actively participated in left-wing activism. He publicly supported students who refused the draft and even refused to pay half of his taxes. He collaborated with other like-minded people such as with Mitchell Goodman, Denise Levertov, William Sloane Coffin, and Dwight Macdonald to found the anti-war collective RESIST. Due to his activism, he was also arrested numerous times. But nothing could deter his rebellious spirit.

As a prominent academician, he used his university position to motivate and inspire the student activists, and along with his colleague Louis Kampf began running special courses on politics at MIT, independently of the political science department which he felt was too conservative.

Noam Chomsky travelled to Hanoi in 1970 to give a lecture at the Hanoi University of Science and Technology. On this trip he also visited the refugee camps at Laos. The following year, he gave the Bertrand Russell Memorial Lectures at the University of Cambridge. His lectures were collected and published as ‘Problems of Knowledge and Freedom’ in late 1971.