01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

The Chomskys in Israel In 1953, while Noam was still a member of Harvard's Society of Fellows, he and Carol decided to spend some time in Israel, a country in which both, for a long time, had thought of settling. In the end, however, they simply went and lived on a kibbutz for about six weeks. This experience was still an important one for the couple, because it allowed them to see what life could be like in a successful left-libertarian community where people engaged in manual labor and intellectual work. Noam was assessed as unskilled upon his arrival at the kibbutz, which was called Ha-Zorea, and so he became a supervised agricultural laborer. This was a very poor kibbutz. There was little food, lots of hard work, and, most importantly, what Noam described as an "ideological conformity." He became uneasy with "the exclusiveness and the racist institutional setting" (Chomsky Reader 9); he was even more disturbed that "these highly educated and perceptive left Buberites couldn't see it" (31 Mar. 1995).

State of Israel founded, 1947­1948 Slansky Trials

The Israeli state had been established in 1947 ­ 48. Noam had been opposed to its creation as he feared the socialist institutions of the Yishuv and the potentially binational character of Palestine would be rejected in favor of the state system. While in Israel, he had withessed non-Jews being marginalized and "treated rather shabbily, with a good deal of contempt and fear" (Chomsky Reader 9), and his personal experience of this double standard justified his doubts about the virtues of a religious state. The kibbutz where the Chomskys stayed had a Buberite orientation, and was populated by well-educated German Jews. The Chomskys' stay there coincided with the Slansky trials in Czechoslovakia and the last stages of the Stalin purges, which, strangely enough, found supporters even on this kibbutz. Although the ideological differences that Noam had with some fellow kibbutzniks were not what motivated him to leave, and although Carol had hoped to stay on, they both returned to Cambridge, and Noam received an extension from the society until 1955. Carol did go back for six months in 1955, and then returned to Cambridge with the intention of moving permanently to Israel with Noam; but "for one or another reason," Noam writes, "I'm not sure exactly why, it never happened" (31 Mar. 1995).