Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, political commentator, and Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Born in Philadelphia to a Jewish family, his father, William Chomsky, was a scholar of the Hebrew language. Raised in an environment focused on Hebrew education and Zionist cultural movements, Chomsky worked as a Hebrew teacher in his youth and spent three months living on a kibbutz in Israel in 1953.
In linguistics, Chomsky developed the theory of generative grammar and Universal Grammar, which analyzed language as an innate cognitive capacity. Across his career, he has published over 150 books on linguistics, media, and foreign policy, including “Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media” (1988), co-authored with Edward S. Herman, which introduced the propaganda model of corporate news media. He joined the faculty at MIT in 1955 and later served as a Laureate Professor at the University of Arizona.
Since the late 1960s, Chomsky has been a vocal critic of U.S. foreign policy and Israeli military governance in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Grounding his critiques in secular humanism and anti-imperialist political theory, he advocates for Palestinian self-determination and opposes U.S. military aid to Israel, characterizing the political arrangements in the West Bank and Gaza as a form of illegal occupation and “worse than South African apartheid.”