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Friday March 23, 2007

Tania Reinhardt, linguist and far-left activist, dies

by etti abramov
ynetnews.com

Controversial linguistics researcher and far-left activist Tania Reinhardt died in her sleep in New York early on March 18 at age 63.

Reinhardt was globally prominent in the field of theoretical linguistics and was known for her work in areas such as syntax, semantics, discourse analysis and psycholinguistics. Noam Chomsky, her doctoral adviser at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had a profound impact on her intellectual development and politics.

After returning to Israel in the 1970s, she began teaching at Tel Aviv University’s Department of Comparative Literature, her main academic home until she took early retirement in 2006 and accepted a professorial position in New York.

In Israel, Reinhardt was best known for her radical political opinions.

Immediately after the signing of the Oslo Accords, she condemned the treaty as a Palestinian surrender. Later, she opposed the “road map” to peace, charged that the security barrier was turning the West Bank into a giant prison and accused the Israeli media of being untrustworthy in its coverage of Arab-Israeli relations. “In order to know what’s really going on, you need to read the British daily the Guardian and watch Al-Jazeera television,” she said.

In 2002 Reinhardt committed perhaps the most controversial act of her long career when she signed a British petition calling for a European boycott of Israeli universities. For many of her colleagues, this was a step too far and appears to have led, eventually, to her decision to leave Israel.

Reinhardt was considered extreme in her political views even by many left-wing activists.

Over the years, Reinhardt published countless political articles in Yediot Ahronot and various journals, accusing successive Israeli governments of deceiving the public and placing sole responsibility for the lack of peace with the Palestinians on Israel.

Reinhardt is survived by her husband, the poet Aharon Shabtai, and a son.

Moshe Ronen and Merav Yudilovitch contributed to this story.

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