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Chomsky, Seymour Melman, and the Council for Arab-Jewish Cooperation Chomsky made contact with Avukah through the knowledge and ideas of Zellig Harris, and, later on, through his friendship with former Avukah members such as Seymour Melman (who served as executive secretary). Melman is older than Chomsky (by about seven or eight years). The two became reacquainted in the 1960s, when Chomsky discovered Melman's work. They then established a close friendship. Chomsky now knows that Melman was compiling accomplishments well before this time. Both Harris and Melman were also associated with a group that grew out of the left wing of Avukah, known as the Council for Arab-Jewish Cooperation. Its main activity was publishing the Bulletin of the Council on Jewish-Arab Cooperation, 1944 ­ 1949. Its principal writers were Harris and his wife, Bruria. The bulletin, which also had some Hebrew and Arabic issues, was respected by people like Hannah Arendt. Chomsky has expressed his respect for this organization and its publication on many occasions, notably in a passage from Peace in the Middle East? Reflections on Justice and Nationhood in which, citing a 1947 issue of the bulletin, he comments that the council focused on "the possibilities for independent political action by workers as a class, as contrasted to reliance on decisions of any of the big powers" (64). In a note Chomsky adds, "I should emphasize that my own point of view was heavily influenced by this group and a number of the people associated with it" (89), of whom Seymour Melman was the most important. When asked about Melman, Chomsky replies that he did "important work on workers self-management in the '50s, and was the only person, along with Lawrence B. Cohen, to have developed the major ideas that animated Harris and his circle in the late 1940s, when they were working intensively on all this, within the framework that Harris describes in his posthumous [unpublished political] manuscript" (31 Mar. 1995).APS Forum on Physics and Society

Melman's work still cited today, e.g. APS Forum on Physics and Society

Melman trained in economics and industrial engineering and worked at Columbia University. In 1956, someone gave the university a grant to investigate the feasibility of developing an inspection procedure that would prevent the violation of a disarmament system; Melman ran the project. As a result, Inspection for Disarmament was published, with Melman as editor. He went on to become director of a wide-ranging series of studies and acquired a detailed understanding of the whole military complex, which he described in Pentagon Capitalism: The Political Economy of War.