Left-wing academic dies in her sleep

Israeli linguist Tanya Reinhart, who called on Europe to boycott Israeli academics, died in her sleep March 17 while vacationing in New York. She was 63. A linguist at Tel Aviv University, Reinhart recently had taken a post at New York University. She was best known for her outspokenness on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, calling for withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza and supporting an European effort to boycott Israeli academics.Reinhart was a graduate of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where her thesis adviser was Noam Chomsky, a Jew who is a virulent critic of Israel. According to the New York Times, Reinhart left Israel last year, planning to divide her time between NYU and Utrecht University in the Netherlands.