Zvi Griliches

Zvi Griliches was born in Kaunas, Lithuania, on September 12, 1930, and died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on November 4, 1999. He was a member of Harvard's economics faculty from 1969, and served at the time of his death as the Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics. Griliches was a survivor of the Holocaust and wrote a moving personal account of his experiences. After the war Griliches spent two years in Munich, joining a Zionist youth group, Hashomer Hazair, and ultimately sailing by illegal ship to Palestine, where he was captured by the British and interned on Cyprus for seven months. He arrived in Palestine in September 1947 and served briefly in the pre-state Israeli army. He enrolled for a year in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as a student in history. Griliches' sister and uncle also survived the war, and emigrated to the United States. He received a scholarship and enrolled as a student in agricultural economics at Berkeley in 1951, completed a bachelor's degree in two years and a master's in one year, and met and married his wife, Diane Asseo Griliches, with whom he later had two children, Eve and Marc. In 1954, Griliches enrolled at the University of Chicago as a graduate student in economics. He was appointed assistant professor of economics two years later in 1956 and received his Ph.D. in 1957. He rose through the ranks to serve as professor of economics from 1964 until 1969. In 1969 Griliches brought his unique combination of Chicago economics and practical wisdom to Harvard.