By focusing on “this razor-thin instant called NOW…notice that right now, you’re basically okay. You can trust that gravity will keep holding you in place. You can trust the air you are breathing. You can trust everything in the entire universe to be as it is. You are already coping with it right now, and right now is the only thing you’ll ever have to cope with.”
I loved when she talked about our thoughts and the question: “ARE YOU SURE IT IS TRUE?” Often our terrible beliefs are actually NOT TRUE!
As seen on THRIVE GLOBAL: “Prepare Your Pandemic Pivot with Ken Lindner’s 8C’s: Choreograph your Career by Consistently implementing Conscious, Constructive, success-evoking Choices, made with Cognitive Clarity.
As Lindner states: “The difference between individuals who consistently fulfill their dreams and those who don’t is that the former make constructive and self-enhancing choices on a consistent basis.”
This reminds me of a quote by Leonardo da Vinci: ”It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.”
Last year, We Said Go Travel,my website, was read in 201 countries! Thanks for all of your support!
I used to travel with a hula-hoop! It always brought smiles.
When I was in Vanuatu, we were invited to Lowinio Kustom Village in Tanna. The chief of the village had given me permission to bring my hula-hoop. We danced and laughed together! Learn more about my trip in Vanuatu: click here and see us Hula-hooping in this video:
WHERE CAN YOU FIND MY TRAVEL VIDEOS?
Here is the link to my video channel on YouTube where I have over 1.3 million views on YouTube! (Exact count: 1,328,843 views) Thank you for your support! Are you one of my 3,085 subscribers? I hope you will join me and subscribe!
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Joshua Krug earned a B.A. with Honors and Distinction from Yale, an MDiv from Harvard, and a PhD from NYU. He sits at the intersection of vision and implementation in Jewish education, with experience facilitating high school, gap-year, college, young adult, and adult Jewish learning and meaning-making. He lives to empower diverse persons to experience Jewish texts and contexts as powerful resources as they transform the world. Krug’s writings can be found in EJP, Tablet, Substack, and Opening Doors.
This week’s Torah Portion – Parashat Emor (Leviticus 21:1-24:23) – begins with a set of purity regulations for priests. It then continues to list the main high holidays and to tell the story of a blasphemer who is stoned to death by the community.
When studying past dystopias in school, we assure ourselves that we would never have fallen for the same propaganda that brainwashed millions. We insist that we would have been abolitionists in America or would have protested against racism in apartheid South Africa. Legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its various branches are a direct result of our modern mindsets — we continue to take steps to prevent further suffering of minorities.
Specifically, TitleVI of this act prohibits discrimination based on race, color or national origin in colleges that receive federal funding, stating:
No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.
While Title VI does not cover discrimination based on religion, individuals who face discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin do not lose protection under Title VI for also being a member of a group that shares common religious practices. Discrimination against Jews may give rise to a Title VI violation when the discrimination is based on an individual’s race, color, or national origin.
However, in the sea of political messages on a typical college campus, discerning what is and is not discrimination can perpetuate a harmful double standard for Jewish students. Campus life for Jewish students is anything but the utopia of inclusivity advertised in the brochures. We are frequently harassed by politically-motivatedpeers and professors and sometimes witness fellow students praise convicted terrorists with impunity, solely because their violent efforts contribute to delegitimizing Israel. For example, at my school, Case Western Reserve University (CWRU), Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) shared a post on their Instagram page (@cwru_sjp) that glorified Ghassan Kanafani, the terrorist responsible for the Lod Airport Massacre.
This, sadly, is just another instance of how CWRU students are forced to carry on our education in the face of unrelenting antisemitic messages. For Jews, Title VI guidelines are not only ignored, but universities also turn a blind eye to antisemitism on campus by refusing to take responsibility or action for on-campus incidents.
In early 2020, for example, the Radical Student Union (RSU) at Case Western Reserve University, a group on the AMCHA’s antisemitism watchlistfor college campuses, reignited their Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Bombarded by flyers and stickers while walking to class every day, I made my own flyers that fact-checked the RSU’s erroneous accusations leveled against the Jewish State.
Poster found on Case Western Reserve University campus in February 2020 promoting the Boycott, Sanctions and Divestment movement. Israel demolishes homes of convicted terrorists or as a result of other illegal activity relating to the homes, not for unjust reasoning as this flyer suggests.
After I put up my flyers in the student center, I was followed by a stranger all the way home. I went to the school administration to inform them about what had happened. Using date and time records from my FitBit to help locate the security footage, the university’s Office for Equity found that one of the leaders of the Radical Student Union not only followed me to my dorm (which was nowhere near his own dorm) but was also taking photos of me with his cell phone the entire time.
Despite their telling me that the tapes were “disturbing to watch,” CWRU’s Student Conduct office emailed me saying they found no wrongdoing in this student’s actions, as there was “no evidence of religious discrimination.” I sent multiple emails providing more information on modern antisemitism and the nature of Judaism as an ethno-religion — specifically referencing Judaism’s ethnic origins in modern-day Israel as context for Title VI’s relevance to the harassment — but I was ignored.
After an attorney I worked with sent an email to the university’s Office of General Counsel referencing university handbook codes about general harassment and stalking, the Office cited the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) — the act that keeps student educational records confidential — as a reason to ignore the attorney and my concerns about the student’s doings.
Although CWRU employs its own Office for Equity, it became clear that the school officials had no idea how antisemitism rears its ugly head on college campuses in modern times. My request for modern-day antisemitism training for school officials went ignored, and I found myself instinctively asking where the panic button was when I started working in the on-campus kosher restaurant, fearful I would be targeted again.
It became clear that the school officials had no idea how antisemitism rears its ugly head on college campuses.
During orientation week, every freshman sits through various diversity training seminars, where they are promised an education free of ignorance. When I started my graduate school orientation this fall at CWRU, I was again promised an education free of discrimination and harassment from other students. My experiences as an undergraduate at CWRU seemed to contradict these statements, so I reported the social media posts from the school’s SJP group praising terrorist Ghasan Kanafani to the Office for Equity. Again, I was ignored, and the post is still up to this day. The page blocked my personal page from seeing anything else.
CWRU’s inaction has real consequences on Jewish lives, as anti-Zionism breeds acts of violence. For example, in 2020, there was a 14% increase in antisemitic hate crimes. More concerning, however, is the 60% of overall hate crimes contributed to antisemitism while Jews make up less than 2% of the American population. It’s time to end the double standard for campus equality in the lives of Jewish students around the world.
Isabel Davidson is a student at Case Western Reserve University and a 2020-2021 fellow for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting & Analysis.
