Obituary of Aryeh Blumberg

Aryeh Blumberg of Montclair died peacefully on January 7, 2016, at home at the age of 87. Resident of Montclair since 1973, he was born in Koenigsberg, East Prussia, at that time part of Germany. He was Professor of Finance at Montclair State University at his retirement in 1999. He had also served as Professor of Economics at the Harvard Summer School since 1982, and, for 20 years, as Director of the Harvard Summer Economics Program, which he helped to build into a large internationally- oriented program, He held an appointment as an Associate of the Department of Economics and of Eliot House. He also taught at the University of Chicago and its business school, Western Kentucky University, and Vanderbilt University earlier in his career. Professor Blumberg and his father, Jerome Joachim Blumberg, the only surviving members of his immediate family, came to the U.S. in late 1946, initially to the home of relatives, the Kaplove family of Weehawken. Aryeh received early admission to the University of Chicago where he received all three of his degrees, including a Ph.D. in Economics in 1973. He volunteered for U.S. military service during the Korean War, attached to Supreme Allied Headquarters in Tokyo and then in the reserves, attaining the rank of 1st Lt. in the Army. Throughout his life, he did pro bono work for the military including a course for officers on Leadership at the Marine Corps University in Quantico, Virginia, and speeches for naval aviators of the Atlantic Fleet, United State Navy, at the Oceana Naval Air Station in Oceana, Virginia. Professor Blumberg’s publications included an early article on John Stuart Mill, and later articles in the field of economics on Eurodollars and on the purchasing power parity of the dollar. He testified before the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs of the United States Senate in 1979, on the operations of foreign exchange markets. He was a member of the Princeton Club of New York, the Alpha Delta Phi Fraternity, and of the Emeriti Faculty of Montclair State University. . In 1968, he married writer Broeck Wahl Blumberg of Tennessee, who survives. They shared a life of art, music, reading, friends and travel including five trips to Japan and a long voyage from Athens to Bangkok. He had abiding interests in history, political philosophy, classical antiquity, and Japan. His legacy lives in the students and young people whom he mentored and loved, including Bea Binkowska of Bloomfield, New Jersey; Can Erbil of Watertown, Massachusetts; Phil Mazzini of Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey ; CAPT Christopher Murdoch of Madison, Wisconsin; Claus Tigges of Berlin, Germany; Philippe Graf von Stauffenberg of London, England; Sayoko Yoshida of New York; his Godson, Jeff Klein of Arlington, Massachusetts; and his wife’s cousins of the McCampbell clan. Hugh M. Moriarty Funeral Home handled the arrangements, and services were private. Contributions in his name can be made to the Montclair Public Library or to the Classics Department of the University of Chicago to fund Undergraduate Summer Research.