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• Reading Henry James with Jim Kraft: Part II

  • Start
    Saturday, March 06, 2021
  •  
    (EST)
  • End
    Saturday, July 10, 2021
  •  
    (EDT)
  • Schedule
    5 sessions
  • Location
    Online via Zoom

  Register

  
  

  Reading Henry James
  with Jim Kraft: Part II
  

  Saturdays, March 6, 2021- July 10, 2021
  3:00 pm - 4:30 pm 
  Online via Zoom: registration required
  $50 for OLLI at BCC members; $65 for non-members
  

  Click here to register or call 413.236.2190 (M-F 9am-4pm) to register by phone with a credit card.

  Longtime OLLI instructor James Kraft will lead the next installment of his monthly course entitled "Reading Henry James," starting on Saturday, March 6 at 3pm, and continuing monthly on Saturdays at 3pm through July 7th for five sessions.

  Considered one of the greatest writers in English, Henry James is known for his psychological insight into his characters, and for his provocative prose.  The prose is considered to have three phases: early narratives that are accessible portraits of his time; more challenging narratives and prose called the middle periods; the late and complex style that embodies his most challenging perceptions.  The discussion will examine the three phases in the reading of James's major novels and tales.

  Reading Schedule:

  • Saturday 3/6/21: "The Figure in the Carpet" (1896), "Brooksmith" (1898) and "The Beast in the Jungle" (1903)

  • Saturday 4/3/21: The Ambassadors (1903)

  • Saturday 5/1/21: The Wings of the Dove (1902)

  • Saturday 6/5/21: The Golden Bowl (1904)

  • Saturday 7/10/21: Review and wrap-up

  Please read again any work that you have already read.  A second reading of James is a different and exciting experience. Henry James is not a quick read; we recommend starting the readings well in advance of the discussion session.

  Reading Henry James is led by longtime OLLI literature instructor James Kraft, who attended Princeton, King’s College, Cambridge University, and Fordham.  He has a doctorate in literature and has taught at the University of Virginia, Université Laval in Quebec City, and Wesleyan in Connecticut.  He was assistant director of the Whitney Museum for eight years, and now teaches at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Berkshire Community College and at the New York Society Library in New York City.

  Click here to register or call 413.236.2190 (M-F 9am-4pm) to register by phone with a credit card.

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• OLLI Spring 2021 Online Semester

  • Start
    Monday, March 22, 2021
  •  
    11:30 AM (EDT)
  • End
    Tuesday, May 04, 2021
  •  
    5:00 PM (EDT)
  • Location
    Online

  Register

  
  

  OLLI's Spring Semester of Online Courses

  March 22 to May 4, 2021
  Classes run weekly for 90 minutes.
  

  Enjoy OLLI at BCC's live, interactive, online courses from the comfort of your own home using the free, easy-to-use  Zoom program (we'll show you how!) No tests, no grades, no prerequisites (except OLLI membership), just learning for the love of learning. 

  Register securely online here or call 413.236.2190 (Mon-Fri, 9am-4pm) to register by phone with a credit card, or with any questions you may have. To sign up for OLLI courses, you must be an OLLI annual member. (Not a member yet? Join here! )
  

  OLLI Spring Semester-at-a-Glance Click on the course names to read more about them.

  Mondays

  Today's Headlines | Lenny Tabs

  Changes We Hardly Noticed | Linda Halpern

  A Sonnet A Day Keeps Spring On Its Way | Kate Sontag CLOSED- AT CAPACITY

  Tuesdays

  Trading with the Enemy: The German Military, Diamonds and Oil in World War II | Carl Goodman

  The Federal Bureau of Investigation: 1908-Today | Alan Rubin

  The Right to Vote: Reexamining Women’s Suffrage | Katherine Kidd
  Free course!  Please register by clicking here if you are not an OLLI at BCC member.
  

  Troy | Richard Matturro

  Wednesdays

  Glory and Grandeur: Ancient Greece and Rome | Philip Deely

  Islands in Deep Time | Markes Johnson

  Indigenous Voices: Presentations by Native Americans | Michael Wilcox

  The Sovereignty Goddess | Susan Wozniak

  Thursdays

  Real Estate Investments 101: A Basic Introduction | Stephen Pearlman

  Luminism and Beyond: Currents in Landscape Art 1850-1914 | Ralph Pearson

  Demystifying Home Cooking for Better Health | Anna Gershenson

  Fridays

  Great Decisions | John Dickson

  Science Conversations | Hank Gold

  Hemingway in Paris: A Moveable Feast and The Sun Also Rises | John Clarke CLOSED- AT CAPACITY

  Berkshire Performing Arts Previews | Naomi Spatz and Barbara Waldinger

  
  

  Not sure which classes you want to take? Sign up for one or more Flexpasses, which allow you to attend six individual class sessions of your choice within a semester, as long as the class in not full. Click here to learn more about Flexpasses.

  Course fees are $50 for one course, $95 for two or three, and $125 for four or more courses within a semester. Each Flexpass counts as one course. Click here to register online. Needs-based partial scholarships are also available. For more information on scholarships, email Executive Director Megan Whilden.

  Schedule conflicts? No worries! All of our courses are recorded, unless otherwise noted. If the live schedule does not work for you, or if you miss a session or two, you can request a link to the recording and watch it at your convenience.

  Questions? Contact us at olli@berkshirecc.edu or 413.236.2190. We look forward to seeing you online!
  

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• The Right to Vote: Reexamining Women's Suffrage

  • Start
    Tuesday, March 23, 2021
  •  
    (EDT)
  • End
    Tuesday, May 04, 2021
  •  
    (EDT)
  • Schedule
    7 sessions
  • Location
    Online

  Register

  
  

  The Right to Vote: Reexamining Women's Suffrage

  Tuesdays, March 23 - May 4, 2021
  1:3o-3pm Eastern; Free & Online via Zoom
  

  Click here to register for free.
  

  2020 marked the centennial of the 19th amendment. In this course, we will explore the history of women’s suffrage in the United States, the constitutional framework within which the suffragists worked, and the continuing efforts to address women’s issues including voting, elected representation, and gender related public policy efforts.

  This live and interactive course is free and open to the public, and includes the following guest speakers:

  

  March 23: Thomas Gerety on "The Right to Vote: Constitutional Constraints."  Click here to watch the class recording. Dr. Gerety holds a JD and Ph.D. from Yale University. He served as Dean of the College of Law at the University of Cincinnati and is former president of both Trinity and Amherst Colleges.  He was executive director and Brennan Professor at the Brennan Center for Justice, New York University (NYU) School of Law. He recently retired as Collegiate Professor of Law and Humanities, NYU.

  March 30: Barbara Berenson on "Massachusetts in the Woman Suffrage Movement: Revolutionary Reformers"  Click here to watch the class recording.  Ms. Berenson is a historian and the author of Massachusetts in the Woman Suffrage Movement: Revolutionary Reformers and other books. A former Senior Attorney at the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, she currently teaches at Tufts University and Harvard Law School.

  April 6: Rebecca Edwards on "Suffrage in the Gilded Age." Dr. Edwards received her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. Her research interests focus on the post-Civil War era and includes electoral politics and the history of women and gender. She teaches courses on the 19th-century United States, women in the United States up to 1890, and the American West, and is the author of New Spirits: Americans in the ‘Gilded Age’ 1865-1905.

  April 13: Lauren Santangelo on "Suffrage and the City: New York Women Battle for the Ballot."  Dr. Santangelo is the author of Suffrage and the City: New York Women Battle for the Ballot and a historian with a focus on gender and the urban environment. She earned her Ph.D. at the City University of New York's Graduate Center and is a Lecturer at Princeton University where she teaches in the Writing Program.

  April 20: Liv Cummins and Rob Hartmann on "Suffrage and Song: Suffrage Protest Music." Ms. Cummins brings expertise as a musical theater lyricist/book writer, theater director, screenwriter, and singer/songwriter, and is a graduate of Skidmore College and NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She’s a Professor of Drama & Creative Writing at Lesley University, having been on the faculty since 2007.   Mr. Hartmann received his MFA from New York University’s Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program, where he was a member of the faculty for 15 years. Rob has had more than a dozen musicals produced across the United States in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis, Seattle, and Nashville. 

  April 27: Cathleen Cahill on "Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement."  Dr. Cahill is a social historian who explores the everyday experiences of ordinary people, primarily women. She holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago. She focuses on women's working and political lives, asking how identities such as race, nationality, class, and age have shaped them, and is the author of Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement.

  May 4: Robyn Rosen on "Unfinished Business: Women in National Politics." Dr. Rosen has taught U.S. History and Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Marist College since 1994.  Her research has focused on American women’s political activism and social movements, particularly the history of the birth control movement in the 20th century. More recently, her research has expanded into the politics of reproductive rights and men’s responses to the women’s movement in the 1970s.

  SUGGESTED READING:  The list below includes books authored by the speakers:

  Massachusetts in the Woman Suffrage Movement: Revolutionary Reformers, Barbara Berenson. [The History Press, 2018]

  New Spirits: Americans in the ‘Gilded Age’ 1865-1905, Rebecca Edwards. [Oxford University Press, 2nd edition, 2010]

  Suffrage and the City: New York Women Battle for the Ballot, Lauren Santangelo. [Oxford University Press, 2019]

  Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement, Cathleen D. Cahill. [University of North Carolina Press, 2020]

  
  

  Katherine Kidd, moderator, earned her Ph.D. in international relations at the University of Pennsylvania.  She directed the programs and taught in international studies at Sacred Heart and Fairfield Universities.  She has taught courses for OLLI at BCC on women in politics, contemporary Russia, Hannah Arendt, global public health, and more.
  

  Click here to register for free.
  

  This program is supported by Mass Humanities.

  

  
  

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• Mr. Noble Melancholy Online Performance

  • When
    Friday, April 23, 2021
  •  
    4:00 PM (EDT)
  • Location
    Online via Zoom

  Register

  
  

  Mr. Noble Melancholy

  A new play by Karel Fisher and Maryanne Sherman

  A Berkshire Historical Society Theatre Production co-sponsored by OLLI

  Friday, April 23, 4:00 pm Eastern
  Free & open to all; click here to RSVP
  

  Join the Berkshire County Historical Society and the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Berkshire Community College (OLLI) as we present Mr. Noble Melancholy, starring John Trainor as Nathaniel Hawthorne. A virtual event, viewers will step into the North Parlor at Arrowhead to hear from Herman Melville’s friend and mentor, Nathaniel Hawthorne, as he shares thoughts about his life, friends, writing career, and his brief sojourn in Berkshire County in the “little red cottage” for 18 months of his life.

  Following the hour-long performance, there will be a Q&A period with Trainor, and playwrights Karel Fisher and Maryanne Sherman. Karel Fisher is an OLLI member, instructor and a co-founder of OLLI's Performing Arts Initiative. John Trainor will be leading a class on Athol Fugard’s The Road to Mecca in OLLI's Summer One 2021 semester.

  Click here to register for free and receive the ZOOM link.

  This program is funded in part by Mass Humanities, which receives support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and is an affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

  
  

  
  

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• The New Future Of Old Age In Today’s Longevity Economy

  • When
    Thursday, April 29, 2021
  •  
    3:30 PM (EDT)
  • Location
    Online via Zoom

  Register

  

  The New Future Of Old Age
  In Today’s Longevity Economy

  An Online Talk with Professor Joe Coughlin
  Founder & Director of MIT's AgeLab

  Thursday, April 29th, 3:30pm Eastern
  Free & open to all; Click here to RSVP

  Join us online for a fascinating live discussion on the future of growing older with Dr. Coughlin. He'll discuss opportunities and challenges for entrepreneurship and innovation for an aging society, as well as his call for Boston and the New England region to become a longevity hub - pioneering new approaches to serving older adults.

  Joseph F. Coughlin, PhD is Director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AgeLab. His most recent book is The Longevity Economy: Inside the World's Fastest Growing, Most Misunderstood Market (Public Affairs, 2017).  A researcher, teacher, speaker & advisor, his work explores how global demographics, technology, and changing generational behaviors are transforming business & society.  

  Dr. Coughlin was appointed by President George W. Bush to the White House Advisory Committee on Aging and by Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker to the Governor’s Council on Aging, where he co-chaired the Innovation & Technology Subcommittee. A Behavioral Sciences Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America and a Fellow of Switzerland’s World Demographics & Ageing Forum, Coughlin is a Senior Contributor to Forbes and writes regularly for MarketWatch and the Wall Street Journal.

  Dr. Coughlin was named by Fast Company Magazine as one the ‘100 Most Creative in Business’ and by the Wall Street Journal as inventing the future of retirement. Recently, Coughlin was recognized as one of 15 World Minds by the Zurich-based World Minds, a select community of global leaders in science, arts and business.

  This talk is presented in partnership with:

   

  

  
  

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• The Ritchie Boys: America’s Jewish Secret Weapon During World War II

  • When
    Wednesday, May 05, 2021
  •  
    7:00 PM - 8:30 PM (EDT)
  • Location
    Online via Zoom

  Register

  
  

  The OLLI Distinguished Speakers Series presents
  Al Treidel on

  The Ritchie Boys:

  America’s Jewish Secret Weapon During World War II

  May 5, 2021 at 7:00 pm Eastern
  

  Online via Zoom 
  Click here to register safely and securely online
  or call 413.236.2190 (M-F 9am-4pm) to register by phone with a credit card.

  In late 1942, the US Army decided to create a special program to make use of recently arrived Jewish emigres’ familiarity with Germany and its language. Approximately 2,000 young Jewish men (primarily from Germany) were secretly recruited to train at Fort Ritchie in Maryland to be schooled in interrogation and counter-intelligence techniques. Most of these young men had left their families behind in Europe and were anxious to become an important part of the defeat of the Nazis. Taking their lives into their own hands, the “Ritchie Boys” provided roughly 2/3 of the human intelligence used in the fight against the Nazis. Their work saved hundreds of thousands of lives and may have actually shortened the war. Inasmuch as they were directed not to share this classified information about their training and exploits during the war, only recently have we learned about these special individuals. Hear about these incredible young men and their daring exploits directly from the son of a Ritchie Boy.

   

  Al Treidel has enjoyed a 50-year career as a public-school administrator and teacher on all levels of public education and at the university level instructing both undergraduate and graduate students. Treidel holds a BA and MEd degrees from the University of Hartford and advanced degrees from Columbia University. For the final 10 years of his career, Mr. Treidel served as a turnaround specialist for struggling schools. Information about the Ritchie Boys was only declassified about 10 years ago. After doing considerable research, Treidel discovered that his father was a Ritchie Boy. Al has received a number of prestigious awards and recognitions including the Solomon Schechter Award in 2017. Since retiring in 2016, Treidel has taught a number of adult education courses and has made presentations on the Ritchie Boys up and down the east coast of the United States.

  Admission is $10 for OLLI at BCC and Berkshire Museum members, and $15 for the general public.  Admission is free for Berkshire Community College students, youth 17 and under, and those holding WIC, EBT/SNAP, or ConnectorCare cards.
  

  Pre-registration is required. Click here to register safely and securely online or call 413.236.2190 (M-F 9am-4pm) to register by phone with a credit card.

  In Partnership with the Berkshire Museum

  
  

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• What is Living and What is Dead in Fascism?

  • When
    Thursday, June 10, 2021
  •  
    7:00 PM - 8:30 PM (EDT)
  • Location
    Online via Zoom

  Register

   
  

  The OLLI Distinguished Speakers Series presents
  Professor David Baum on

  What is Living and What is Dead in Fascism?
  The 20th Century's Most Troubling and Enduring Idea at 100 

  June 10, 2021 at 7:00 pm Eastern
  

  Online via Zoom 
  Click here to register safely and securely online
  or call 413.236.2190 (M-F 9am-4pm) to register by phone with a credit card.

  When Bard College at Simon's Rock Professor David Baum first began to be interested in the Fascist period in Italy a little over 20 years ago, Fascism seemed a dead letter, the very stuff of disinterested scholarship. Since then, of course, it’s experienced quite the revival. The 2016 election triggered the publication of at least four noteworthy books on fascism intended for broad audiences and at the same time conjured a movement – Antifa, short for anti-fascism – that very much held that its nemesis was back. The term “fascist,” for the longest time merely a generic term of opprobrium, elbowed its way back into the political lexicon.
  

  In retrospect, the assumption that Fascism was an extinct political species now appears wildly naïve. Current attempts to understand the populist right and hyper nationalists, here and around the globe, tend to focus on two causes: one sees rightwing populism as a kind of false consciousness, a misguided reaction to the economic upheaval of the 21^st century; the other, the playing out of an imbedded racism in American life responding to the perceived threat of demographic change to white privilege. Both explanations have merit, but ultimately, we need to return to the origins of Fascism in the post-Great War period to better understand both the forces that initially called forth the movement and the prejudices of the dominant ideological discourses – liberal and socialist/communist - that weakened the West’s response to Fascism’s rise.

  David Baum received his PhD in European History from Yale University and has taught at New York University, Skidmore College, Union College, the American University in Iraq-Sulaimani, West Texas A&M University and is currently at Bard College at Simon's Rock in Great Barrington. He is also the head of school at the John Dewey Academy, also in Great Barrington. His research and teaching have focused on the Italian Renaissance, Italian Fascism, and the Modern Middle East. His current research project is on views of the Renaissance during the inter-war period in Italy, entitled, Fascism and the Italian Renaissance.
  

   Admission is $10 for OLLI at BCC and Berkshire Museum members, and $15 for the general public.  Admission is free for Berkshire Community College students, youth 17 and under, and those holding WIC, EBT/SNAP, or ConnectorCare cards.
  

  Pre-registration is required. Click here to register safely and securely online or call 413.236.2190 (M-F 9am-4pm) to register by phone with a credit card.

  In Partnership with the Berkshire Museum

  
  

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