A quick glance at the program for this year’s Hebrew Center Summer Institute speaker series is enough to show that change has happened at the institute.

It is suddenly more diverse in both subject matter and guests.

Chalk it up to the new chairman of the summer institute committee, Geraldine Alpert, and her desire to see the series broaden its appeal.

“I thought I would try to get a more diverse program that attracts people from all over the Vineyard, not just the Jewish population,” she said.

The horror of the Civil War was the graphic and powerful subject of the 1989 Academy Award-winning film Glory, screened at the Katharine Cornell Theatre on Monday night. The event kicked off the Civil War Film Series, jointly sponsored by the Martha’s Vineyard Film Society and the Martha’s Vineyard Museum to commemorate the country’s most deadly war through movies, talks and exhibitions. The museum recently launched an exhibit titled We Are Marching Along: Martha’s Vineyard and the Civil War which continues until April 2012.

“Never put anyone out of your heart,” the late Hindu holy man Neem Karoli Baba told his disciples, among them writer, lecturer, and holy man in his own right, Ram Dass, and his friend, regular travel buddy, writer and photographer, Rameshwar Das. These two men share many affinities, among them a decades-long passion for Eastern philosophy coupled with an ability to purvey these ideas to a similarly fascinated American public.