Back to This Giant: Noam Chomsky

Chomsky’s radical uncle… was a very interesting person who had a lot influence on his nephew in the late 30s and following years. Under his influence Chomsky had assimilated what is enduring in Freud’s work before he was 18 (although his uncle had not gone beyond the 4th grade in school, he knew Freud’s work so well that people started sending patients to him and he became a lay analyst). About the time of Pearl Harbor, that is, when Chomsky was 13 or 14, he would catch the train up to New York and he would “hang out” all night and participated in lively discussion and arguments, at his uncle’s kiosk or in his apartment nearby…

… As a child of practically the only Jewish family in a bitterly anti-Semitic Irish and German Catholic neighborhood, with open support for the Nazis until the United States entered the war, he was deeply impressed by the rise of Nazism and other horrors of the 1930s, which affected him very much, particularly the Spanish Civil War.

As he remembers it, the Jewish working-class culture in New York, “the most influential intellectual culture” during his early teens, was very unusual (and was not there to stay – a few years later it had died out):
It was highly intellectual, very poor; a lot of people had no jobs at all and others lived in slums and so on. But it was a rich and lively intellectual culture: Freud, Marx, the Budapest Strings Quartet, literature and so forth. (pp. 11-12, “Language and Politics”)