Biography

Amitai Etzioni was born on January 4, 1929 in Cologne, Germany. He was married to Patricia Kellogg, Minerva Morales and Eva Horowitz. He died on May 31, 2023 in Washington, District of Columbia, USA.

His family escaped Nazi Germany, and eventually immigrated to the British mandate of Palestine. They settled in a cooperative Jewish settlement outside Tel Aviv, where Etzioni adopted Hebrew names (Amitai comes from the Hebrew word for truth). As a teenager, he fought for Israeli independence as a member of the Palmach, an underground army unit.

He attended the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where he received a bachelor's degree in sociology and a master's degree. He moved to the United States to earn a doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley.