On September 11th, 2017, We will feature Drs. Gerald Friedman and Jackie Wolf.
Gerald Friedman
Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts, Gerald Friedman was born in New York City in 1955. After graduation from Columbia College in 1977 he worked on the research staff of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, before attending graduate school at Harvard where he earned a Ph.D. in economics. In addition to his 1998 book, State-Making and Labor Movements. The United States and France, 1876-1914, he has written Reigniting the Labor Movement: Restoring means to ends in a democratic labor movement (2008) and Microeconomics: Individual Choice in Communities (3rd edition 2017). Professor Friedman is also the author of numerous articles on topics in the labor history of the United States and Europe, on the evolution of economic thought, labor economics, economic theory, the history of slavery in the Americas, and on current economic issues. He has been a correspondent on economics to television and other media outlets, a consultant to labor unions, and has drafted funding plans for campaigns for single-payer health insurance in Colorado, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and to Physicians for a National Health Plan. He is currently working on plans for New Jersey and the state of Washington. Professor Friedman lives in Amherst with his wife and his dog, Corduroy where he wishes his two wonderful daughters would visit more often.
Follow him on twitter at @gfriedma
Learn more about him here.
Jackie Wolf is a sociologist, wife of historian Barry J. Levy, mother of two sons and lives in Amherst MA. Jackie grew up in Oxford, North Carolina and Surfside, Florida. She graduated from Douglass College of Rutgers University (NJ) and completed a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA) in 1978. Jackie wrote a dissertation on leadership in colonial North Carolina. Her academic career started with teaching courses in social stratification, women’s studies and medical sociology at colleges and universities in the Cleveland, OH area. Her career took a turn to research when she was hired by the Department of Epidemiology, Case Western Reserve University Medical School (Cleveland, OH), to direct the field project for a large health survey of urban, elderly, lower income, minority households. Publications from that study critiqued the idea of training volunteers to conduct health assessments of their neighbors. Jackie moved to Amherst with her family in 1989. She began an active involvement in issues of racism and classism in the local public schools her sons attended and continues that effort. Jackie is also Chair of the League of Women Voters of Amherst Health Care Committee bridging the single payer work of the League and Mass-Care.