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Avukah's Program By the time Chomsky had become a student at the University of Pennsylvania, he had embarked on his own intellectual journey, but he remained attuned to his family's concerns ­ specifically, those related to Jewish cultural and political issues. He was finding a new level of autonomy during these years, but at the same time he was establishing links with people who shared his particular fascinations, Zellig Harris among them. But Harris came at some of these issues from a different angle, and this angle was, in a sense, reflected in Avukah's program. Avukah's commitment was to "fight anti-Semitism," defend civil liberties, participate in "anti-fascist action," "liberalize and modernize the Jewish environment," and "organize for maximum assistance in the migration of Jews to Palestine." (It is interesting that this three-front approach was criticized as "inappropriate," however, in the summer 1942 issue of the Avukah student newspaper by none other than Bruria Kaufman, Einstein's brilliant young assistant, who eventually married Zellig Harris.) This program prompted Avukah members to initiate an array of activities. For example, they published Avukah Student Action, "a journal of progressive thought and action," throughout the early 1940s. The efforts of many young activists went into the periodical, including Nathan Glazer (managing editor), Arlene Engel, Jerry Kaplan, Lorraine Kruglov, Bernard Mandelbaum, Rachel Naimann, Jack Osipowitz, Milton Shapiro, Margolith Shelubsky, Hannah Weil, and Rosalind Schwartz. Avukah also produced pamphlets. In an unsigned article that appeared in the February 1942 Avukah Student Action, the author notes that "when frayed, censored envelopes arrive with requests for literature from England, South Africa and even a concentration camp in Canada [!], the work takes on zest." Group members also engaged, later on, in research projects such as one described by Sam Abramovitch. Based upon the Marxist hypothesis that fewer and fewer people are required to feed the entire population, the project was an attempt to discover another way of organizing society's resources. Abramovitch recalls that "the study divided the activity of society into three parts, the first one being economic relations [of] output [ERO], which includes those activities necessary for people to eat, live, and what have you. The second is ERP, the economic relations of production, which includes the essential organizational functions related to production. The third one is economic relations of capitalism (ERC), which includes activities undertaken because we live in a peculiar society; in other words, transcendental activities." Defining tasks according to utility helped those involved in the project understand where the emphasis could be placed in the distribution of resources: If war is not absolutely necessary, then armies and the military-industrial complex become a component of the ERC ­ the economic relations of capitalism. Insurance companies are ERP. If you build automobiles, then that is output. If you produce food, it is output. Things that are neutral were considered output ­ like restaurants, for example. Other things are there only because we live in this type of society. If society could change, then these things would no longer be necessary. If they are not necessary for people to survive, then they would change under a different system. (12 Feb. 1991) In Seymour Melman's opinion, Avukah received support from Zionist leaders because it was the only Zionist student organization around; it was their only conduit into the university community. In 1939 ­ 40, Melman received an Avukah travel fellowship, which he used to attend the World Zionist Congress in Geneva and to visit the Kibbutz Artzi near Haifa. On the kibbutz, he met up with some of his friends (such as Sylvia Binder, who had been the secretary of Avukah in 1935), and became acquainted with Arabs, Poles (Poland had just been overrun by the Nazis), and Palestinians. Upon returning to the United States in the spring of 1940, Melman contributed to a special issue of the Avukah newspaper, Avukah Student Action, which focused on the condition of the Yishuv, the prestate Jewish settlement in Palestine, and on the Arab and British reactions to it. Melman remembers that The American Zionists were taken aback by the stiff demonstrations that the Yishuv ran against the laws which prohibited land purchase. There were massive riots in all the big cities. The support to the Yishuv at the time from American Zionists was abridged, limited, constrained, by their unwillingness to be negatively critical [of] Roosevelt and Churchill. That was dogma. The leadership group in Avukah had a rather different view ­ that of critical support, not unconditional support. That marked us off from almost all the rest of the mainstream Zionist organizations. (26 July 1994) The views of Avukah's leadership group both mirror and reinforce the opinions that Chomsky held on the same issues as an undergraduate and later on.