Writing Samples
“Additional Reporting By” Credits
CentSai
- “Is It Time for Entrepreneurs to Move to ‘Red’ States?” — Apr 26, 2017
- “What Is Telemedicine, and Is It Worth It?” — Feb 22, 2019
- “Is Dental Insurance Worth It?” — Mar 02, 2019
Staff Biography: Jason Santos
Jason Santos started working with Park Avenue Synagogue in 2010, spending his first two years at PAS as a contractor. During that time, he shined as a leader and was promoted to a managerial position in 2012, later becoming Facilities Director in 2018. As Facilities Director, Jason manages three buildings for PAS – 50 E 87th Street, 9 E 89th Street, and the Eli M. Black Lifelong Learning Center at 11 E 89th Street — as well as five clergy and staff apartments. Before PAS, he served as a maintenance supervisor at CBS for five-plus years, where he learned many of the skills he uses today, from cleaning to woodwork and repairs.
“What drives me every day is that there’s not a week that goes by that I don’t learn something. Every day is a challenge,” Jason says. “Any task that anybody gives us, we handle it with respect.”
In his spare time, Jason enjoys watching sports and movies (ask him about Marvel trivia any day!), as well as playing baseball and basketball. He has even been known to tear up the waterways on a jet ski! He was raised by his mother, a fearless leader who continues to inspire him. Jason aims to make her proud every day.
Simchat Torah Honoree: Linda Yarden
Linda Yarden and her husband, Chris Smith, came to Park Avenue Synagogue in 1999, after searching for a shul that felt right for them. While she grew up Modern Orthodox, as an adult with a successful career, Yarden wanted to feel that she truly had a seat at the table not only at work, but also at her synagogue. They looked for an egalitarian place of worship in which they both would feel welcome. PAS’s values and sense of community spoke to both of them, and it wasn’t long before Yarden became more involved in its activities. How did she become such a hallmark of PAS’s communities and committees? It all started with her children, Callie and Eric’s, assignment for the Penn Family ECC mock seder: nut-free haroset. Puzzling over how to create this recipe, Yarden spoke with the haroset maker at a big-name caterer. The nut-free haroset was a hit, and she will happily provide anyone who asks with the recipe.
Soon she wasn’t just making sweet treats, but chairing trips (both within the U.S. and to Israel), and she and her family were helping with events from Purim spiels to Mitzvah Day and co-chairing committees such as Interfaith Families (now part of Membership and Inclusion), where Yarden continues her involvement. Her work with Membership and Inclusion — especially Interfaith Families — has helped her affirm the belief that we are all b’tzelem Elohim (made in the image of God) and put into action her commitment to the ideals of Abraham: Not only did Abraham keep his tent open at four sides, but he actively sought people out in order to make them feel welcome.
And while Yarden had always felt a connection to the PAS community, she views her recent three-year term chairing the Kol Nidrei Appeal as an eye-opening experience. During her term, she got to see first-hand how congregants rallied in support of each other and the synagogue during the height of the pandemic, just as much as the synagogue supported them. “I have profound respect for the embrace and generosity of the PAS community,” Yarden says. You can still find Yarden on the Board of Trustees, helping to further the values of Abraham’s open tent at PAS: meeting people where they are, welcoming them into the community, creating a sense of belonging, and cultivating and appreciating the diversity that surrounds us. “I truly want everyone to feel like they belong at PAS,” she says. “Not just people who look like you … love like you … walk like you … Everyone.”
Simchat Torah Honoree: Arthur Gurevitch
A Park Avenue Synagogue member since 1991, Arthur Gurevitch is quick with a joke and a laugh. Perhaps that’s part of what makes him such a driving force behind the scripts for PAS’s annual Purim spiel. Gurevitch joined his first spiel in 2014 as a way to become more involved at the shul while also juggling work and family obligations. He was looking for something outside of his comfort zone – a weekly change of pace – and this fit the bill nicely. It wasn’t long before he found his niche: creating and writing the spiel. You might recognize his prose from such hits as “Spiel! The Musical,” “Megillah U: Esther Goes to College,” and “The Princess Spiel: A Purim Fairytale,” to name a few.
Even before he became the Purim staple he is today, Gurevitch always felt at home at PAS, where he has made many friends, gone on life-changing international trips, and enjoyed services and educational opportunities. The synagogue community continues to be a buoy for him today. When his father-in-law, Dr. Arnold Moses, passed away in August, it made a huge difference to have the support of clergy and PAS community who know the family so well. Dr. Moses regularly tuned into PAS Livestream services from his home in Syracuse, and one of his last conversations with his daughter and son-in-law was a call to express his excitement when in-person services restarted and he saw them on Livestream.
Just as PAS has played a significant role in Gurevitch’s life, his presence in day-to-day synagogue activities has been an uplifting influence for many, especially during the pandemic. Accustomed to catching up with friends after Shabbat services every week, he and his wife, Linda Moses, decided that there must be a way to continue that connection once the lockdown started. So they started hosting a weekly Kabbalat Shabbat Zoom, where there would be as many as 25 windows on the screen each week to light candles, make kiddush, say hamotzi, and catch up with friends. “It seemed like a no-brainer,” Gurevitch says. “Who’d have thought that an unlimited Zoom account and a weekly email reminder would make such a difference for so many people?”
While he has never held an official Board or Committee position at PAS, Gurevitch has no doubt made — and continues to make — a profound impact the community. “I am humbled by this honor,” he says. “My initial reaction was that they had me confused with someone else. It’s quite a remarkable thing, and I’m very much moved.”
Student Artists Compete at MoCA
Oberlin College is known for creativity and artistic talent, and recently this artistry has found a home at Cleveland’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA). Oberlin students participated in two art competitions at MoCA, Another Vibrant “Fight,” and the Student Slideshow at MoCA, where Oberlin swept the awards.
Currently, a work of art by Oberlin students is one of five student pieces on MoCA’s white walls. Oberlin’s piece, entitled a volt, a form and composed of colorfully collaged cardboard starbursts and tendrils backed by a web of bright strings of yarn, is the work of seniors Mary-Kate Kelly, Claire Lachow, Calder Singer, and Isabel Yellin. According to the artists’ statement, “the work was inspired by images of the human neurological system, in particular the naturally decentralized arrangement of the cells and how they connect to one another.” The student work is part of MoCA’s Another Vibrant Art “Fight” competition.
The four other student pieces displayed in Another Vibrant Art “Fight” come from the Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland State University, Kent State University, and the University of Akron’s Mary Schiller Myers School of Art. Each one is its own unique response to ilegitimo, a show by the artist collective known as “assume vivid astro focus” (avaf), which, like the student art it inspired, is on display at MoCA through January 9, 2011.
“Our installation was a response to the concepts within ilegitimo, and we made a conscious decision not to emulate avaf’s style,” Lachow, a studio art major, says of Oberlin’s work.
“We realized that avaf primarily discusses the multi-tasking, multi-media world we live in today and the overwhelming qualities of that,” says Yellin, also a studio art major. “Because of that, we wanted to try to systematize the way information is received, especially through imagery and text, such as what we see on the internet.” Thus, different sections of the piece have different themes.
In early September, Visiting Assistant Professor of Studio Art and Drawing Don Harvey proposed to the students that they represent Oberlin in the competition. This gave the four volunteers two weeks to complete their project, which was installed on September 27.
Harvey says that he also helped find some funding for the students, but “aside from that, I simply checked in on their progress from time to time, otherwise they were very self-directed.”
The ultimate recognition went to the University of Akron team, which won the competition. “When all of the groups were installing the pieces a few days prior to the opening, it was pretty clear that their piece was a more sophisticated installation. It is incredibly well-executed, really stunning to look at,” Lachow says.
And though Akron won, says Yellin, “The feedback and praise we got from the staff at MoCA, Oberlin’s Art Department, and our family and friends make us feel like we were the winners.”
Even MoCA’s Director of Education and Associate Curator Megan Lykins Reich, who helped organize the event, had praise for the Oberlin students’ work. She called the work “unique” and “thoughtful,” commending it for being the one school that “did not stay within box form. There is more of an openness.”
The praise was even greater for Oberlin students November 3, when Allison Fontaine-Capel ’12, Elias Steltenpohl ’11, and Frances Lee ’13 swept first, second, and third place respectively at the Student Slideshow at MoCA competition. Contestants had to submit between eight and 10 slides of their work and give a short introduction about each. Finalists were selected from Oberlin, University of Akron, Kent State University, Cleveland Institute of Art, and Cleveland State University.
Fontaine-Capel, a studio art major, addressed her identity as an artist. Discussing and getting recognized for what she calls “just the byproduct of my personal creative outlet,” Fontaine-Capel says, “made me consider more deeply what it means to be an artist.”
“Articulating one’s artwork is not easy,” says Steltenpohl, an environmental science major and studio art minor. But, he admits, “The event provided a good opportunity to work on communicating some of the ideas I am thinking about while working.”
Rosemary Burke, a graduate student at Case Western University and MoCA intern who organized the slideshow competition, says she was impressed by how well all three Oberlin students spoke. “They were all very articulate. They were able to explain what the art meant to them,” she says.
The three winners received monetary awards, “though the event was much more about getting a little bit of exposure and recognition,” says Steltenpohl.
The artists behind a volt, a form think the same of their work. “As a young artist and undergraduate student, showing work in a museum is a real accomplishment, and it’s definitely emblematic of what was a very fruitful collaboration,” Lachow says.
Composting with Edible Mushrooms
Darrin Schultz’s lab is filled with clear garbage bags of shredded paper and paper towels. Shelves are lined with used paper coffee cups, pizza boxes, and jars filled with fat popcorn kernels, some of which are covered in white fungi — mycelia, which, in the right conditions, will grow into mushrooms. Schultz ’13, a biology major, hopes to create a system of using edible mushrooms to compost waste, particularly paper. The mycelia in his jars, vials, and Petri dishes will eventually grow into blue oyster, shiitake, shaggy mane, and other mushrooms.
“My ultimate goal for this project is to develop easy methods for those who aren’t mycologists (people who study fungi) to collect waste and grow edible mushrooms, while producing excellent compost at the same time,” he says. “What I would like to do immediately is make it so that co-ops can grow them for food.”
He has also spoken with the owners of Slow Train Café about using their waste coffee grounds. Since mushrooms and mycelia break down the core components of a material, turning them into nutrients that the fungi need, foods such as coffee grounds won’t transfer undesirable ingredients like caffeine into the mushrooms, according to Schultz.
He pulls a small vial out of a refrigerator sitting on a counter. Delicate white strands jut out from a stick inside the container, jostling slightly when disturbed by the pale, peach-colored liquid that partially fills the vial. This is a culture of white oyster mushrooms, Schultz explains. Such samples are later transferred to Petri dishes filled with agar (gelatin made from seaweed), and then to the grain jars. “The clumps of popcorn actually are colonized by the mushroom mycelium, so it is from these colonized grains that the mycelium grows,” he says. “It really is as simple as moistening the paper [from the bags] and adding the colonized grains.”
The project, if successful on a large scale, may eventually make available a broader range of edible mushrooms than is usually seen in the American diet. “That’s another thing I care about — increasing diversity in what we eat,” says Schultz.
“O Brave New World”: Taymor’s Tempest Dreamlike, Occasionally Terrifying
William Shakespeare’s The Tempest is nothing if not surreal. Julie Taymor, OC ’74, takes that to heart in her new film adaptation of the classic play. The movie is extraordinarily dreamlike, with countless special effects that vary from obvious green screen to frighteningly realistic animation. Today’s films habitually focus on hyper-realistic effects using the latest technology, making the transparent, almost two-dimensional appearance of the mischievous sprite Ariel (played by Ben Whishaw) that much more startling.
These effects, however, vary not only in realistic quality, but effectiveness. At their best, the film’s special effects make Ariel beautiful and occasionally terrifying, especially when he floats amid ocean currents or appears as a nightmarish creature in service of his master, Prospera (Helen Mirren), a feministic version of the original play’s Prospero.
At their worst, The Tempest’s special effects become distracting. Take, for example, the patchy mix of white and black skin given to Caliban (Djimon Hounsou), an island native and Prospera’s slave. Or the illusions that Prospera conjures to celebrate her daughter’s engagement to Ferdinand, prince of Naples (Reeve Carney), which are cut short by a clashing overlay of Mirren’s face just as the images graduate from a conglomeration of astrological pictures to a more pleasing montage of doves and sprites.
Much of the rest of the film is just as hit-and-miss as the graphics, particularly the costumes. It was a relief when Prospera shed her garish sorcerer’s cloak for a more simple and lovely blue tunic. And her daughter Miranda’s (Felicity Jones) nature-made dresses were far more beautiful than the unusual — though fascinating — zipper-covered doublets of the shipwrecked band of Italian nobles that includes Ferdinand and his relatives.
The story essentially adheres to the basic guidelines of the play, with a few tweaks to allow for Prospero’s sex change. The sorcerer, now the widow of the deceased Duke of Milan, tells her daughter the story of how she was exiled for witchcraft by her traitorous brother Antonio (Chris Cooper) and the king of Naples, Alonso (David Strathairn). By sheer luck, these traitors, along with a few friends and relatives, pass Prospera’s island home in exile on a ship ride home from a wedding in Tunisia. With the aid of Ariel, Prospera creates the storm for which the show is titled, shipwrecking all the passengers on different parts of the island and thus creating three distinct storylines.
In Taymor’s recreation of the tale, the three narratives vary widely in quality. Even in its original form, Ferdinand’s lone adventure that leads him to fall in love with Miranda is a banal and overdone love story, and Carney’s dull, often unenthusiastic delivery of his lines makes one impatient to move on to the two far more entertaining shipwrecked parties.
Alfred Molina and Russell Brand provide superb comic relief as the drunken castaways Stephano and Trinculo. With the encouragement of Caliban, the two make an excellent group of bumbling, would-be usurpers of Prospera’s throne. Although Hounsou’s acting is frequently over-exaggerated, once he joins forces with Brand and Molina he begins to play a slightly subtler, calmer Caliban. While Hounsou returns to exaggerated behavior at times, particularly in the scenes where Stephano and Trinculo ply Caliban with alcohol, his portrayal ultimately makes the slave a funnier and a more poignant character.
But the Most Valuable Player award goes to the group of shipwrecked nobles on whom Prospera seeks revenge. Antonio and Alonso find themselves stranded alongside the King’s brother, Sebastian (Alan Cumming), and Gonzalo (Tom Conti), the one lord who aided Prospera in her escape. These lords’ scenes are not only well-blocked, but also well-acted: Though Strathairn’s Alonso is overshadowed by the electric dynamics between Cooper, Cumming, and Conti, he delivers a solid performance as the stoic father who has lost hope of finding his son alive. Additionally, Conti’s somewhat doddering Gonzalo is a perfect foil for the snarky Cumming, who fits into his role almost too perfectly.
Although Mirren holds her own as Prospera, the ensemble commands more attention, and while the visuals catch the viewer’s eye, the actors ultimately carry the film. Indeed, one of the highlights of The Tempest was the opening scene in which the storm destroys the ship carrying the Italian nobles. In the end, the relative simplicity of the acting in the scene was far more captivating than the dramatic monologues and songs recited over surreal images.
Kosher Halal Co-op Vital to OSCA, Oberlin Community
Imagine Oberlin without vegan dining options. Or without vegetarian options. What if vegans and vegetarians were required to undergo regular review of their eating habits? Given our student body, the results would be rather disquieting, and no doubt garner more than a little protest. And yet, when the Kosher Halal Co-op (KHC), which caters to the dietary needs of Jewish and Muslim students, faces similar obstacles, there is very little noise made about it.
The Oberlin Student Cooperative Association (OSCA), of which KHC is a member, recently informed KHC that they wish to reinstate a long-unenforced policy “that the relationship between OSCA and KHC will be reviewed annually” — an extra ordeal that no other Oberlin co-op is forced to deal with. In addition, OSCA has expressed frustration with the lack of 24-hour access to the co-op for inspections, as inspectors need to be accompanied through the co-op’s facilities due to kashrut (Jewish kosher laws) and halal (Muslim dietary laws).
But as Conservatory junior and KHC member Emily Ostrom noted in a conversation after lunch on Wednesday, “24-hour policy won’t solve anything. It won’t make anything cleaner.” She argued that offenses cited by the General Management Team and OSCA board were many years old, and that cleanliness would not be changed by hypothetical 3 a.m. inspections. (The co-op had, in fact, gotten a “nearly pristine” evaluation from an inspection that morning, only getting marked down by two points.)
To add insult, there is a clear misunderstanding of Jewish and Muslim customs. In a letter to the OSCA membership, three members of the GMT state that it accommodates the co-op “by not inspecting KHC on Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays, or Jewish holidays known as Chag,” when there is no reason that health inspectors should avoid the space on Fridays before the start of Shabbat, which does not occur until an hour before sunset, or on Thursdays. In fact, in a response letter, KHC states that, “We do not know how or why this entered into Continuing Policy.”
Being part of OSCA also means that KHC is more accessible to many people. Not only is it cheaper than CDS rates, but many people who would not otherwise join, and who are not necessarily Jewish or Muslim themselves, become members of KHC. When I ate with the co-op again for dinner on Wednesday, only three of the seven people I spoke with afterward said that they would have joined KHC if it were not for OSCA. But all of them insisted that they were very happy that they were in the co-op, and had remained in OSCA with the explicit intention of participating in KHC.
Besides, the relationship between OSCA and KHC is not merely one-sided. The co-op provides an accessible safe space for people with very specific dietary needs and provides a good image for OSCA. “It makes negotiations with the College easier because the College does not like dealing with OSCA, but KHC makes the College look good,” says KHC member Nicole Siderits. “We have a Kosher and Halal eating space where Jews and Muslims eat together.”
But for all the frustration that the co-op’s members have expressed, many of them have hope. “I have great respect for Paul DeRonne [president of OSCA], who’s handling this very well. I think this is nothing that can’t be worked out,” Siderits says. “I think that both parties are very committed to this, to OSCA, to the diversity within OSCA.”
Hopefully she is right. It would be a very sad day if the Kosher-Halal Co-op was torn apart by an unwillingness to tolerate the minor difficulties that come along with dietary restrictions. The co-op members put it best in their letter to OSCA: “KHC is OSCA. KHC members are OSCA members, and we love it being that way.”
Old News is Good News 