Tanya Reinhart was an
IsraelIsrael officially the State of Israel , is a developed state in Western Asia located on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. It borders Lebanon in the north, Syria in the northeast, Jordan in the east, and Egypt on the southwest, and contains geographically diverse features within its...
i linguist who wrote frequently on the
Israeli-Palestinian conflictThe Israeli–Palestinian conflict is an ongoing dispute between Israel and the Palestinians. It forms part of the wider Arab–Israeli conflict. The term is also used in reference to the earlier phases of the same conflict, between Zionist halutzim and the Arab population living in Palestine under...
. She contributed columns to the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot and longer articles to the
CounterPunchCounterpunch can refer to:* Counterpunch , a punch in boxing* CounterPunch, a bi-weekly political newsletter* Counterpunch , a type of punch used in traditional typography* Punch-Counterpunch, a Transformers character...
, Znet, and Israeli Indymedia websites.
Reinhart studied philosophy and Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University,
JerusalemJerusalem is the capital of Israel and its largest city in both population and area, with a population of 747,600 residents over an area of if disputed East Jerusalem is included...
as an undergraduate, where she later received an
M.A.A master's degree is an academic degree granted to individuals who have undergone study demonstrating a mastery or high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional practice...
in comparative literature and philosophy.
Tanya Reinhart was an
IsraelIsrael officially the State of Israel , is a developed state in Western Asia located on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. It borders Lebanon in the north, Syria in the northeast, Jordan in the east, and Egypt on the southwest, and contains geographically diverse features within its...
i linguist who wrote frequently on the
Israeli-Palestinian conflictThe Israeli–Palestinian conflict is an ongoing dispute between Israel and the Palestinians. It forms part of the wider Arab–Israeli conflict. The term is also used in reference to the earlier phases of the same conflict, between Zionist halutzim and the Arab population living in Palestine under...
. She contributed columns to the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot and longer articles to the
CounterPunchCounterpunch can refer to:* Counterpunch , a punch in boxing* CounterPunch, a bi-weekly political newsletter* Counterpunch , a type of punch used in traditional typography* Punch-Counterpunch, a Transformers character...
, Znet, and Israeli Indymedia websites.
Reinhart studied philosophy and Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University,
JerusalemJerusalem is the capital of Israel and its largest city in both population and area, with a population of 747,600 residents over an area of if disputed East Jerusalem is included...
as an undergraduate, where she later received an
M.A.A master's degree is an academic degree granted to individuals who have undergone study demonstrating a mastery or high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional practice...
in comparative literature and philosophy. In 1976 she obtained a
Ph.D.Doctor of Philosophy, abbreviated PhD , for the Latin , meaning "teacher of philosophy", or alternatively, DPhil, for the equivalent , is an advanced academic degree awarded by universities...
from the
Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyThe Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological research...
. Her thesis supervisor was
Noam ChomskyAvram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, political activist, author, and lecturer. He is an Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Chomsky is well known in the academic and scientific community as...
.
Reinhart was a former professor of
linguisticsLinguistics is the scientific study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of meaning...
and literary theory at Tel-Aviv University. She was also a guest lecturer at
Duke UniversityDuke University is a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892...
http://news.duke.edu/mmedia/features/mideast/reinhart_1104.html and at
Utrecht UniversityUtrecht University is a university in Utrecht, The Netherlands. It is one of the oldest universities in the Netherlands and one of the largest in Europe. It is rated as the best university of the Netherlands, ninth best university in Europe, and 47th best in the world in the Academic Ranking of...
in the
NetherlandsThe Netherlands is a country in Northwestern Europe, constituting the major portion of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. It is a parliamentary democratic constitutional monarchy. The Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east...
, and ended her international career as Global Distinguished Professor at
New York UniversityNew York University is a private, nonsectarian, research university in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...
(NYU).
Professional Work
Noam ChomskyAvram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, political activist, author, and lecturer. He is an Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Chomsky is well known in the academic and scientific community as...
has described Reinhart's contributions to the field of
linguisticsLinguistics is the scientific study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of meaning...
as "original and highly influential," particularly regarding "syntactic structure and operations, referential dependence, principles of lexical semantics and their implications for syntactic organization, unified approaches to cross-linguistic semantic interpretation of complex structures that appear superficially to vary widely, the theory of stress and intonation, efficient parsing systems, the interaction of internal computations with thought and sensorimotor systems, optimal design as a core principle of language, and much else."
Reinhart's academic work also extended well beyond the field of linguistics, to that of literary theory, mass media, propaganda, and other core elements of intellectual culture.
Political Activism
Chomsky has noted Reinhart's activism was not limited to words and that she was often on "the front line of direct resistance to intolerable actions, an organizer and a participant, a stance that one cannot respect too highly." Commenting on her death, he wrote that Reinhart would be remembered "not only as a resolute and honorable defender of the rights of Palestinians, but also as one of those who have struggled to defend the moral integrity of her own Israeli society, and its hope for decent survival."
Reinhart was an outspoken critic of Israel's policies in the 1967-occupied territories. She argued that Israel should abandon the
West BankThe West Bank is a landlocked territory and is the eastern part of the Palestinian territories; on the west bank of the River Jordan in the Middle East. To the west, north, and south, the West Bank shares borders with the state of Israel, which maintains the security of this area. To the east,...
and
GazaGaza is a Palestinian city in the Gaza Strip, with a population of about 410,000, making it the largest city under the control of the Palestinian National Authority....
:
- Israel should withdraw immediately from the territories occupied in 1967. The bulk of Israeli settlers (150,000 of them) are concentrated in the big settlement blocks in the center of the West bank. These areas cannot be evacuated over night. But the rest of the land (about 90%–96% of the West bank and the whole of the Gaza strip) can be evacuated immediately. Many of the residents of the isolated Israeli settlements that are scattered in these areas are speaking openly in the Israeli media about their wish to leave. It is only necessary to offer them reasonable compensation for the property they will be leaving behind. The rest — the hard-core "land redemptions" fanatics — are a negligible minority that will have to accept the will of the majority.
Reinhart pointed out that immediate withdrawal would still leave under debate between six and ten percent of the West Bank with the large settlement blocks, as well as the issues of Jerusalem and the right of return, and maintains that these should be the subject of "serious peace negotiations".
In 2002, Reinhart was heavily criticized in Israel for signing a European petition calling for a moratorium on European support of Israeli academia in protest of Israel's Palestinian policies.
The same year, she also published a book,
Israel/Palestine: How To End the War of 1948, in which she analyzed what she saw as the breakdown during the preceding three years of constructive engagement over the Palestinian issue and the hardening of the Israeli position.
Reinhart gave the 2006 Edward Said Memorial lecture at Adelaide University.
In December 2006, Reinhart moved to New York saying she could no longer live in Israel due to its treatment of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.
Tanya Reinhart was married to Israeli writer
Aharon ShabtaiAharon Shabtai is one of the Hebrew language's leading poets, as well as a translator of Greek drama into Hebrew....
. She has been described as an anti-Zionist.
Death
Reinhart died in her sleep on March 17 2007 in
New YorkNew York is a state in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern regions of the United States and is the nation's third most populous. The state is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
. She was
buriedBurial, also called interment and inhumation, is the act of placing a person or object into the ground. This is accomplished by excavating a pit or trench, placing an object in it, and covering it over.-History:...
in Israel.
Further reading
- Israel/Palestine : how to end the War of 1948, New York : Seven Stories Press, cop. 2002. - ISBN 1-58322-538-2
- The road map to nowhere : Israel/Palestine since 2003, London ; New York : Verso, 2006. - ISBN 1-84467-076-7
Selected publications in linguistics
- 1976. The Syntactic Domain of Anaphora. Ph. D. dissertation, MIT.
- 1981. "Definite NP-anaphora and c-command domains". Linguistic Inquiry 12:605-635.
- 1983. Anaphora and Semantic Interpretation. London: Croom Helm.
- 1993. "Reflexivity" (with Eric Reuland). Linguistic Inquiry 24:657-720.
- 1993. "The innateness of binding and coreference" (with Yosef Grodzinsky). Linguistic Inquiry 24:69-101.
- 1995. "Interface strategies". OTS Working Papers in Linguistics.
- 1997. "Quantifier scope: how labor is divided between QR and choice functions". Linguistics and Philosophy 20:335-397.
- 1998. "Scrambling and the PF interface" (with Ad Neeleman). In: W. Cobler & M. Butt (eds.), Projecting from the Lexicon. Stanford: CSLI.
- 1998. "Wh-in-situ in the framework of the minimalist program". Natural Language Semantics.
- 2000. "Strategies of anaphora resolution". In: H. Bennis, M. Everaert & E. Reuland (eds.), Interface Strategies.
- 2002. "The Theta System: an overview". Theoretical Linguistics 28:229-290.
- 2006. Interface Strategies: Reference-set Computation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
External links
- Reinhart's homepage (Utrecht)
- Date-ordered list of Reinhart's political publications
- Book info
- Interview (November 8, 2002)
- "The guaranteed failure of the road map" (May 16, 2003)
- "The inheritance of Sharon" - An newsgroup of Siena with Tanya Reinhart and Aharon Shabtai. (10 May 2006)
- Radio interview with ABC Australia LNL (October 05, 2006)
- News from Within Podcast: Elections, Occupation and Solidarity - An Interview with Professor Tanya Reinhart (April 2006)
- Linguist, left-wing activist Prof. Tanya Reinhardt dies age 63 Haaretz
Haaretz is Israel's oldest daily newspaper. It was founded in 1918 and is now published in both Hebrew and English in Berliner format. The English edition is published and sold together with the International Herald Tribune. Both Hebrew and English editions can be read on the Internet...
obituary, 19 March 2007
- Palestinian Organizations Mourn Israeli Academic Tanya Reinhart's Death, Calling her "a Great Indefatigable Activist" Al-Jazeerah Information Center
Al-Jazeerah Information Center is a non-profit United States – based "news and research publication" edited by Dr. Hassan El-Najjar, a Gaza-born associate professor teaching sociology and anthropology at Dalton State College, Georgia, founded in 2001. It is not affiliated in any way with the...
, (19 March 2007)
- Obituary in the New York Times (23 March 2007)
- Aharon Shabtai speaks on Reinhart obituary, March 2007, video