Josh Richman
By Josh Richman
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News Same-Sex Weddings Elicit Little Community Reaction in Bay Area
SAN FRANCISCO — After Andy Birnbaum came out in 1995, his mother switched to a Reform congregation to find a spiritual home more accepting of her son’s homosexual orientation, while his father remained in their old Conservative congregation, determined to effect change from within. His father’s only request at the time was that Andy find…
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News New Plan Brings Financial Fitness to San Francisco Community Center
Nate Levine may have cracked the JCC code. About a quarter-century ago, when Levine was a recent college graduate handing out gym towels at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, he overheard people talking about the JCC’s need for a new, modern facility. Private fitness clubs, with their seemingly inexhaustible budgets for equipment and…
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News Former Congresswoman Becomes Darling of the Left
SAN RAFAEL, Calif. — A year ago Cynthia McKinney’s political stock hit rock bottom. The five-term Democratic congresswoman from Georgia suffered an embarrassing primary loss — never having recovered from her suggestion that the Bush administration had ignored warnings about the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. But since McKinney’s August 2002 defeat — which some…
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News A Lone Cowboy Rides Roughshod Over Racism
OAKLAND, Calif. — The parade rolled into downtown Oakland last Saturday just as it does every year, a long, undulating chain of youth groups and dance troupes, drill teams and color guards — and, of course, the cowboys. Some ride solo, others in posses, their horses clip-clopping past office buildings. They smiled as they tipped…
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News California Budget Woes Threaten Elderly
OAKLAND, Calif. — California’s ongoing budget crisis has Jewish federations and their social service agencies bracing for deep cuts that may leave some of their most vulnerable clients in dire straits. Topping administrators’ fears are proposed cuts in their already deficient reimbursements from Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid healthcare program for the poor. That would force…
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News Israeli Arab Wins Political Asylum in U.S.
OAKLAND, Calif. — A federal appeals court in San Francisco has granted political asylum to an Israeli Arab who claims that he suffered from persecution at the hands of the Israeli government and military. As a result of last week’s ruling, Ibrahim Baballah; his wife, Ula, and their teenage son, Ahmad, can’t be deported from…
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News ‘Guru of Ganja’ Sees Cracks Developing in Federal Anti-Drug Laws
OAKLAND — The self-proclaimed “guru of ganja” Ed Rosenthal says his one-day, time-already-served sentence for three marijuana-cultivation felonies proves that federal laws against pot are going up in smoke. But a federal judge in San Francisco insisted that this get-out-of-jail-free card could be played only once. Rosenthal faced the possibility of a decades-long prison sentence…
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News As Tech Bust Lingers, Shuls Find a New Role: Job Bank
OAKLAND, Calif. — Finding work never used to be a problem for Owen Rubin. A computer engineer, he worked for Atari and Pacific Bell before being handpicked by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen to join a high-tech research firm. He went from there to a string of hot start-ups. Then suddenly, in April 2002, after 25…
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News Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s selection as JTS commencement speaker roils graduating class
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Culture An Israeli genocide scholar looks to Israel’s history to understand ‘what went wrong’
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Holy Ground A Jewish farmer broke ground on a synagogue in an Illinois cornfield. His neighbors showed up to help.
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News Protesters picket Manhattan synagogue over Israel real estate sale, testing Mamdani and new law
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