Sara Rubin
By Sara Rubin
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Life Dancing at a Wedding — on Yom Kippur
I was sipping Champagne and presiding over witness signatures on a marriage license under the shade of a redwood tree as the sun started dropping over the ocean below the Santa Cruz Mountains. The newlyweds (my friends) and their families exchanged embraces and congratulations following the heartfelt wedding ceremony I had just officiated. The only…
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Food Talking Kosher Pork With Iconic Foodie Michael Pollan
Michael Pollan considers himself a nature writer, but since publishing “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” in 2006, he’s become a major voice in the cultural revolution currently happening around such food issues as sustainable agriculture, health and locavorism. Pollan is such a cult figure among foodies that people follow him around the grocery store and the farmers…
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Life Why Pop the Question At All?
Forget about the exorbitant price tags that come with many weddings these days. Try $45,000 for a marriage proposal. That’s what ad agency exec Josh Ogle spent last year on an elaborate, scripted, national-media-attention-grabbing proposal to Nataliya Lavryshyn, which included a custom ring, a vintage car to whisk the couple away, and a Pulitzer-prize winning…
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News A Rural Pesach
I was always vaguely aware that Passover was in some way an agricultural festival, but never realized that celebrating food could include consuming meat that came from animals I had known face to face. That was until last spring, when I spent Passover in Alamosa, Colo., a town situated in a high-altitude desert and populated…
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News Blazing New Trails, Musically
It’s not unusual to find overflow congregants watching High Holy Day services on a television in a synagogue classroom, but hearing songs from a recording rather than from a live cantor is still out of the ordinary. Perhaps for some it seems impersonal, nontraditional or risky. Craig Taubman’s new album, “Inscribed: Songs for Holy Days,”…
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News Step One Toward an ML4 Cure: Infect a Mouse
To the untrained eye, the basement-level laboratory at the National Institutes of Mental Health, in Bethesda, Md., looks like a scene out of NASA. Scientists sport full-body plastic suits, hair nets and blue booties — all in an effort to keep the outside world’s contaminations at bay. The lab’s sterility is interrupted only by Dr….
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Culture The Strange Journey Taken by Two Paintings
In 2002, an unusual advertisement in this newspaper caught subscriber Jack Nusan Porter’s eye: Two mysterious paintings, rendered by an unknown artist “at least 210 years” ago, were for sale. The paintings — which, as Porter later learned, were owned by a Ukrainian Jew named Alexander Goykham — had survived two centuries of anti-Jewish persecution,…
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Culture Grant Helps Professor Tackle Adolescent Girls’ Issues
Certain topics of particular interest to adolescent girls go unaddressed in most classrooms, because they make many educators and students squirm: sex, gender, eating disorders, abusive relationships. Dr. Shira D. Epstein aims to change that situation. Epstein, an assistant professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary’s William Davidson Graduate School of Jewish Education, has received a…
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