Ben Bernanke — fed chair with roots in the Russian Empire
Ben Shalom Bernanke was born in Augusta, Georgia, on 13 December 1953 and grew up in Dillon, South Carolina, the son of Philip Bernanke, who ran the family pharmacy, and Edna Friedman, a schoolteacher. His connection to the Russian Empire runs through his mother's family.
In his Nobel autobiography Bernanke wrote that his maternal grandparents, Herschel and Masia Friedman, emigrated from Lithuania around the outbreak of the First World War. They lived first in Maine and then in Connecticut, where his mother was born, before settling in Charlotte, North Carolina. His grandfather, known in America as Harold Friedman, served as a cantor and ritual slaughterer and taught the young Ben Hebrew. Published sources do not name the town the Friedmans came from.
His father's side came from further west. His paternal grandfather, Jonas Bernanke, was born in 1891 in Boryslav in Austro-Hungarian Galicia, never Russian territory, and emigrated from Przemyśl, arriving at Ellis Island in June 1921 with his wife Pauline, a physician trained in Vienna. According to a family oral history, Jonas had served as an Austro-Hungarian officer in the First World War, been captured by the Russians and sent to Siberia. He later bought the drugstore in Dillon that the family ran for decades.
Bernanke graduated from Harvard and took his doctorate in economics at MIT, then taught at Stanford's Graduate School of Business from 1979 to 1985 and at Princeton from 1985, where he chaired the economics department. His research on the Great Depression showed how bank failures had deepened and prolonged it. He joined the Federal Reserve Board as a governor in 2002, chaired the Council of Economic Advisers in 2005-06, and in February 2006 succeeded Alan Greenspan as chairman of the Federal Reserve, serving two terms until 2014, through the financial crisis of 2007-09. Time named him its Person of the Year in 2009.
In 2022 he shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig for research on banks and financial crises. After leaving the Federal Reserve he joined the Brookings Institution as a distinguished fellow in residence. His memoir of the crisis, The Courage to Act, appeared in 2015, and in 2023-24 he led a review of the Bank of England's economic forecasting.
"His maternal grandparents, Herschel and Masia Friedman, emigrated from Lithuania around the outbreak of the First World War and lived in Maine, Connecticut and North Carolina."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Lithuania, then in the Russian Empire (maternal grandparents Herschel and Masia Friedman; town not documented)
His mother's parents, Herschel and Masia Friedman, emigrated from Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire, around the outbreak of the First World War. His father's family came from Austro-Hungarian Galicia, which was never Russian territory.
.svg?width=900)
Lithuania, then in the Russian Empire (maternal grandparents Herschel and Masia Friedman; town not documented). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.