Chomsky was born on the morning of December 7, 1928 to Jewish parents in the East Oak Lane neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of a Hebrew scholar and IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) member, William Chomsky (1896–1977), a native of Ukraine chicago mortgage loans. His mother, Elsie Chomsky (née Simonofsky), a native of what is present-day Belarus, grew up in the United States and, unlike her husband, spoke "ordinary New York English." Their first language was Yiddish, but Chomsky said it was "taboo" in his family to speak it. He describes his family as living in a sort of "Jewish ghetto," split into a "Yiddish side" and "Hebrew side," with his family aligning with the latter and bringing him up "immersed in Hebrew culture and literature." Chomsky also describes tensions he personally experienced with Irish Catholics and German Catholics and anti-semitism in the mid-1930s dental insurance. He recalls German-American "Beer parties" celebrating the fall of Paris to the Nazis. In a discussion of the irony of his staying in the 1980s in a Jesuit House in Central America, Chomsky explained that during his childhood, "We were the only Jewish family around. I grew up with a visceral fear of Catholics. They're the people who beat you up on your way to school. So I knew when they came out of that building down the street, which was the Jesuit school, they were raving anti-Semites. So childhood memories took a long time to overcome atlanta homes for sale."

Chomsky remembers the first article he wrote was at age 10 while a student at Oak Lane Country Day School about the threat of the spread of fascism, following the fall of Barcelona in the Spanish Civil War. From the age of 12 or 13, he identified more fully with anarchist politics