Janet Yellen — treasury sec with roots in the Russian Empire
Janet Louise Yellen was born in the Bay Ridge neighbourhood of Brooklyn on 13 August 1946, the daughter of Julius Yellen (1906-1975), a family physician, and Anna Ruth Blumenthal (1907-1986), a schoolteacher. Her connection to the Russian Empire runs through her father's family.
In May 2022, speaking at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, Yellen said that her father's family had immigrated to the United States from Sokołów Podlaski, a town east of Warsaw. Before the First World War it lay in the Siedlce Governorate of Congress Poland, part of the Russian Empire. She did not give the year the family left. She added that much of the family that remained in Poland was murdered in the Holocaust.
She graduated from Brown University in 1967 and took her doctorate in economics at Yale in 1971, where her teachers included James Tobin and Joseph Stiglitz. She taught at Harvard until 1976, worked as a staff economist at the Federal Reserve Board, where she met her future husband, the economist George Akerlof, and in 1980 joined the faculty of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, where she taught macroeconomics, won several teaching awards and became the Eugene E. and Catherine M. Trefethen Professor of Business Administration in 1999.
She was appointed a governor of the Federal Reserve in 1994 and chaired President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers from 1997 to 1999, while also chairing the Economic Policy Committee of the OECD. In 2004 she became president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, and in 2010 vice chair of the Federal Reserve. In February 2014 she succeeded Ben Bernanke as chair, the first woman to hold the office, and served until February 2018. She then spent two years as a distinguished fellow in residence at the Brookings Institution.
Sworn in on 26 January 2021 as the 78th Secretary of the Treasury, she was the first woman in that post as well, and served until January 2025. She is the first person to have led the Council of Economic Advisers, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury.
"Her father's family emigrated to the United States from Sokołów Podlaski, then in Congress Poland within the Russian Empire; the year is not recorded."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Sokołów Podlaski, Siedlce Governorate, Congress Poland (father's family) (now Poland)
Speaking in Warsaw in 2022, she said that her father's family had emigrated to the United States from Sokołów Podlaski, a town then in the Siedlce Governorate of Congress Poland, part of the Russian Empire. Much of the family that remained was killed in the Holocaust.
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Sokołów Podlaski, Siedlce Governorate, Congress Poland (father's family) (now Poland). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
"Maximum employment is a broad and inclusive goal."