Tanya Reinhart was an Israel

Israel

The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...

i linguist who wrote frequently on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Israeli-Palestinian conflict

The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is the ongoing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. The conflict is wide-ranging, and the term is also used in reference to the earlier phases of the same conflict, between Jewish and Zionist yishuv and the Arab population living in Palestine under Ottoman or...

. She contributed columns to the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot and longer articles to the CounterPunch

Counterpunch

Counterpunch 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.

Biography

Reinhart was born in 1943 in Haifa

Haifa

Haifa is the largest city in northern Israel, and the third-largest city in the country, with a population of over 268,000. Another 300,000 people live in towns directly adjacent to the city including the cities of the Krayot, as well as, Tirat Carmel, Daliyat al-Karmel and Nesher...

 in Mandate Palestine. She studied philosophy and Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem as an undergraduate, where she later received an M.A.

Master's degree

A master's 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

Doctor of Philosophy, abbreviated as Ph.D., PhD, D.Phil., or DPhil , in English-speaking countries, is a postgraduate academic degree awarded by universities...

 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The 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 education and research.Founded in 1861 in...

. Her thesis supervisor was Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky

Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...

.

Reinhart was a former professor of linguistics

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

 and literary theory at Tel-Aviv University. She was also a guest lecturer at Duke University

Duke University

Duke 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. In 1924, tobacco industrialist James B...

 and at Utrecht University

Utrecht University

Utrecht University is a university in Utrecht, Netherlands. It is one of the oldest universities in the Netherlands and one of the largest in Europe. Established March 26, 1636, it had an enrollment of 29,082 students in 2008, and employed 8,614 faculty and staff, 570 of which are full professors....

 in the Netherlands

Netherlands

The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...

, and ended her international career as Global Distinguished Professor at New York University

New York University

New York University is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...

 (NYU).

She died of a stroke in her sleep on March 17, 2007 in New York

New York

New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...

. She was 63 years old. Reinhart is buried

Burial

Burial 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.

Professional work

Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky

Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...

 has described Reinhart's contributions to the field of linguistics

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

 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 Bank

West Bank

The West Bank ) of the Jordan River is the landlocked geographical eastern part of the Palestinian territories located in Western Asia. To the west, north, and south, the West Bank shares borders with the state of Israel. To the east, across the Jordan River, lies the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan...

 and Gaza

Gaza

Gaza , also referred to as Gaza City, is a Palestinian city in the Gaza Strip, with a population of about 450,000, making it the largest city in the Palestinian territories.Inhabited since at least the 15th century BC,...

:

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 Shabtai

Aharon Shabtai

Aharon Shabtai is one of the Hebrew language's leading poets, as well as a translator of Greek drama into Hebrew.-Biography:...

. Reinhardt was considered extreme in her political views even by many left-wing activists, and has been described by Uri Avneri as an anti-Zionist.

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)
• Palestinian Organizations Mourn Israeli Academic Tanya Reinhart's Death, Calling her "a Great Indefatigable Activist" Al-Jazeerah Information Center, (19 March 2007)
• Obituary in the New York Times (23 March 2007)
• Aharon Shabtai speaks on Reinhart obituary, March 2007, video