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Translating ‘tzedakah’ for Marylanders: Sen. Ben Cardin’s long Jewish goodbye
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Ben Cardin’s love letter to Maryland, the state he has represented in the U.S. Senate since 2007, was also a love letter to his family’s Jewish values.
In a video that Cardin released this week to announce his retirement from the Senate, he reminisced about the 56 years he has spent representing Maryland voters in various capacities. In conversation with his wife Myrna, he also reflected on the ideals that animated his work and his family life.
“We use the expression ‘tikkun olam,’ repairing the world. We use it a lot. It’s in our DNA,” Myrna Cardin says in the video. “I love the way you’ve taken that from our family, to Annapolis, to Washington. It undergirds so much of what you do.”
“It also comes back to the tzedakah part of our tradition as Jews to help those that are less fortunate,” Ben Cardin later tells his wife, as a definition of the Hebrew word floats across the screen. Elsewhere, the video shows Cardin in a kippah at his wedding, then surrounded by children including one wearing a kippah himself.
Cardin, 79, this week announced his plans to retire in 2024 from the Senate seat he first won in 2006, with commanding majorities then and since. He wants people to know: He is as much a Jew as he is a Marylander. In fact, he sees the two identities as inextricable.
“It’s been an incredible opportunity,” Cardin told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “The people in Maryland are so understanding. It’s been a wonderful state where I’ve been able to talk about and acknowledge my Jewish faith easily.”
Cardin’s legacy is shaped as much by the still waters of the Chesapeake and the protections he has secured for it, as it is by his Jewish upbringing and the far-reaching human rights law it inspired him to author.
The mention in the five-minute video of tzedakah and its explanation is striking for how casual it is. Cardin told JTA that he wanted to convey, 56 years after he was first elected in 1968 to the Maryland House of Delegates, how much his Jewish identity shaped him.
“My Jewish values are what got me throughout my entire life,” he said. ”I grew up in a very strong Jewish family and a strong Jewish community.”
“Jewish values” can be amorphous when a Jewish politician cites them as fueling his or her actions, but Cardin is able to cite specifics.
He says the involvement of his wife and his cousin, the late Shoshana Cardin, in the Soviet Jewry movement shaped his work in government. “I would come home at night from Congress, and Myrna would ask me, what have I done to help Soviet Jews that day?” he recalled.
Cardin’s close personal ties to the movement propelled him to his years-long involvement with the Helsinki Commission, the network of parliamentary bodies that monitor compliance with the landmark 1975 human rights Helsinki Accords.
It also propelled, decades later, his most significant legislation, the 2012 Magnitsky Act, which sanctions individuals for human rights abuses. Sergei Magnitsky was an accountant who died in a Russian prison in 2009 after exposing massive corruption implicating Russian President Vladimir Putin and his circle.
“You can talk about human rights tragedies, but unless you put a face on it, it’s hard to get corrective action,” he said about why he made sure Magnitsky’s name was attached to the legislation. “So I was determined to put a face on it.”
Naming the act for an individual gave it a face, something he learned from the wristbands he once wore bearing the names of Jewish Prisoners of Zion.
“We put a face on every one of these individuals,” Cardin said of advocates for Soviet Jewry. “And that was the success of the Soviet Jewry movement. Putting a face on the refuseniks, on those that were in prison really helped us a good deal.”
The Magnitsky case underscored how Cardin’s human rights advocacy did not stop with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the freedom of its Jews. In the three years Cardin was the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, from 2015 to 2018, he invited reporters to the Capitol for periodic briefings.
The reporters would gather in the stately Foreign Relations Committee room, framed by daunting portraits of its past chairmen,and take seats around its conference table. At each place, they would find a one-page printout of a single person being persecuted by a repressive regime, usually activists unknown outside of their region.
Cardin made clear the blurry photo atop the printout exercised him more than the portraits on the walls. He would open the meeting with a minute or so of explanation about the persecuted person, and then take questions on whatever was on a reporter’s mind, an unusual gambit in the hyper-controlled Senate. He did not expect reporters to necessarily write about the human rights activist, but he wanted them on the media’s radar.
Cardin’s style, soft-spoken and self-effacing, stood out in a body crowded with self-promoters; he is able to attract bipartisan support and navigate far-reaching legislation through the Senate, cleaning up waterways, enhancing retirement plans and providing dental care to impoverished children.
Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., speaking at J Street’s conference in Washington D,C., April 16, 2018. (J Street)
There were occasions when his best efforts at finding accommodation stymied him, never more so when he was one of just four Democrats in the Senate in 2015 to oppose President Barack Obama’s signature foreign policy achievement, the Iran nuclear deal that traded sanctions relief for Iran’s rollback of its nuclear enrichment capabilities.
He was getting it from both sides: Obama and the organized Jewish community, which mostly opposed the deal. Obama kept him in a room for more than 90 minutes, seeking to attach to the deal the credibility of the lawmaker most identified with Jewish activism. Meanwhile, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee organized a rally at Cardin’s synagogue, Beth Tfiloh in Pikesville, Maryland.
“Call Senator [Barbara] Mikulski and call Senator Cardin and urge them to oppose the deal,” Howard Kohr, AIPAC’s CEO at the time, said in a rare public appearance outside of AIPAC’s policy conferences.
“It was a tough vote,” Cardin recalled. “I was lobbied very, very heavily by President Obama personally. It lasted probably about an hour and a half, two hours. President Obama was pretty insistent on getting my vote, so it was a tough vote.”
Wait, a reporter asks, 90 minutes alone with the U.S. president, for a single vote?
Cardin grins. “It felt like five hours.”
Cardin does not regret the vote; he said the Obama administration gave up too much too early by going into the talks conceding that Iran would walk away with some level of enrichment. But he made it clear that he thought President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the deal in 2018 was a disaster, giving Iran a pretext to break its commitments, leading it to near-weaponization levels of enrichment today.
“One of the most tragic foreign policy mistakes of our time was Donald Trump withdrawing from the nuclear agreement while Iran was in compliance, and today we’re in much worse shape than we would have been if we were still in the agreement,” he said.
AIPAC spokesman Marshall Wittman said the pro-Israel lobby would miss Cardin’s reliable support.
“For his entire tenure in Congress, Senator Cardin has been an extraordinary leader in advancing the US-Israel relationship,” Wittman told JTA. “Time after time, he could be counted on to take the initiative to support our alliance with the Jewish state. We will miss his stalwart leadership but his legacy of standing with our ally will long endure.”
Indeed, with Cardin’s departure, the organized Jewish community is losing go-to senator for Jewish and pro-Israel issues — most recently, Cardin joined Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz in seeking to honor Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir with a gold coin.
Not to worry, Cardin said: Every generation of Jews frets as it ages that it will be the last to fully represent on the American stage.
“I love the Jewish community. You can find every flavor imaginable in the Jewish community, and that’s healthy,” he said. “It was that way when I was growing up, it’s that way today. There are a lot of Jews that have very little identification to the traditions of Judaism, and there are a lot of young people who are much more engaged than I was.”
He added, “We’ve lasted these thousands of years — we’re going to continue to have a healthy, young population that understands the values of our religion and are committed to making sure we carry it out.”
Cardin is concerned by the turmoil in Israel in the face of the government’s radical proposals to overhaul the courts, but even there he sees hope.
“What Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu is doing with the judiciary is wrong, I’m going to speak out against it. I think it weakens their democratic institutions and democracy is their bedrock,” he said. “The Israelis are speaking pretty strongly against what the Netanyahu government is trying to do.”
Cardin described the typical headache of a Jew explaining his faith to others: It doesn’t quite match other faiths’ concepts of identification.
“I keep kosher in my house and we observe the major holidays in the Orthodox traditions, but I’m not an observant Orthodox Jew,” he said. “It’s hard to explain that.”
He recalled the late Sen. Harry Reid calling him, apologetically, to come in on the second day of Rosh Hashanah for a critical vote to fund the government and avoid a shutdown. Reid’s assumption was that Cardin would abjure working for the holiday.
“I said, ‘Look, it’s perfectly OK if you do it in the afternoon, I go to synagogue in the morning — I’ll be there for the vote,” Cardin said.
That’s typical of Cardin’s most tender memories — his non-Jewish colleagues expressing sensitivity to his Jewishness. In 1971, members of the House of Delegates noticing him gathering a minyan to say Kaddish after his mother died, and offering to join in; in 2006 after his election to the Senate, Mikulski telling him that she would handle meet and greets on Friday nights, knowing that he and Myrna routinely have as many as 30 people over for the Shabbat meal.
Asked if he would encourage younger Jews to get into politics, he doesn’t hesitate.
“This is a great country,” he said. About being Jewish, he added, “It has certainly not interfered with my political career.”
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After attacks, Jewish security watchdogs warn of ‘most elevated and complex threat environment’ in recent history
(JTA) — A string of recent synagogue attacks across North America and Europe has left security officials sounding the alarm bells.
“We are in the midst of the most elevated and complex threat environment the Jewish community and this country has seen in modern history,” said Kerry Sleeper, chief of threat management and information sharing for the Secure Community Network, a Jewish security organization.
Sleeper’s comment came during an SCN webinar on Friday, held in response to the previous day’s attack on Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan, where an assailant rammed into the synagogue armed with rifles and smoke bombs.
Though the attack was successfully thwarted by existing security measures, Mitchell Silber, executive director of the Community Security Initiative, said in an interview that Jewish institutions may now need additional layers of protection.
“This might be a bit of a tipping point where we’ve gone to a new level, where really what’s required to secure a Jewish institution in the U.S. starts to look like almost a Europeanization of security,” Silber said.
That would include posting multiple armed guards outside entrances and requiring increased screening before entry, he said. Many European synagogues also require attendees to go through security screening at some distance from the building, rather than at their doors.
“Unfortunately that seems to be where we are right now — the Jewish community has to up its game in terms of the external security of its locations,” he said.
Currently, a shutdown at the Department of Homeland Security since Feb. 14 is halting the review of millions of dollars in security funding for nonprofits, constraining the ability of Jewish institutions and other vulnerable groups to upgrade their security infrastructure.
The Temple Israel attack came within two weeks of attacks in Austin, Texas, and at Old Dominion University in Virginia. Those other attacks were not on Jewish institutions, but Sleeper, a former FBI assistant director, said the “various motivations of the attackers appear to be affiliated with the war between the U.S., Israel and Iran.” He added that the assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Iran, and President Donald Trump’s stated desire to facilitate a regime change, have “contributed to the extremely high threat environment.”
Meanwhile, things have escalated outside the United States. Three Toronto-area synagogues were hit with gunfire over the last couple of weeks, and a synagogue in Rotterdam was targeted by an arson attack early Friday morning, allegedly by a group that has also claimed credit for an explosion at a synagogue in Belgium.
The flurry of attacks has the entire Jewish world on edge going into Shabbat — and some watchdogs say things could soon get worse.
“It is not entirely shocking to those of us who’ve watched this space for a long time,” said Mike Jacobson, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who served in the State Department’s Counterterrorism Bureau. “I would think things would continue to ratchet up again, at least in the short term.”
He pointed to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’ activation of sleeper cells — their agents lying in wait until called to action to commit an attack — across the West, as a danger to vulnerable targets, which includes Jewish communities.
Another source of danger, Jacobson said, comes from copycat attacks.
“There’s also this mix that makes it really hard to sort out in the initial stages, where you’ve got people, not only who may be directly tied to Iran, but people who are so-called ‘inspired’ by this,” Jacobson said. “Those are often really hard for law enforcement to get advance notice on.”
Not always does the threat come from direct orders from Iran, he said. “It’s often difficult to tell: Is this something that is directly tied to the organization, or is this something that is more by someone inspired [by the IRGC]?”
He added, “They are trying to inflict pain in as many directions as they can.”
As security organizations encourage increased caution and awareness of suspicious activity, they are also emphasizing that those measures shouldn’t come at the expense of gathering in communal Jewish spaces.
“We’re not going to let the terrorists take away our confidence or the ability to embrace our religion,” said Michael Masters, SCN’s national director, during the Zoom webinar.
Masters’ sentiment is also shared by congregational leaders like Rabbi Adam Roffman, of Congregation Shearith Israel in Dallas.
“Sure, security is something we think a lot about, and we’ve done our best to protect ourselves,” Roffman said. “And at the same time, the life of this community goes on.”
At Temple Israel, Shabbat services are being streamed from the nearby country club that served as a reunification center for families after the attack. The synagogue wrote on Facebook: “We’re so glad you’re joining us tonight as our community comes together to welcome this much needed Sabbath.”
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Muslim advisor to Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission resigns to protest ‘Zionist political agenda’
(JTA) — The Trump administration’s Religious Liberties Commission was wracked again this week over anti-Israel sentiment, as a second affiliated individual has exited while claiming it had been hijacked by a “Zionist political agenda.”
Sameerah Munshi, a Muslim member of a board that advises the commission, announced late Thursday that she would be stepping down. Her reason, she said, was to protest the dismissal of commissioner Carrie Prejean Boller, who was ousted last month after she used a hearing on antisemitism to expound on her objections to Israel and Zionism.
“In this country, people of faith are having their free expression stripped away, and even their lives put at risk, because of their deeply held beliefs about Palestine, all for the sake of a Zionist political agenda,” Munshi wrote in a resignation letter she posted to Substack. “The removal of a Catholic commissioner for expressing dissenting views grounded in her faith is the exact affront to free expression and religious liberty that I spoke out against.”
Munshi posted her resignation to X just before 10 p.m. Thursday, hours after an attacker drove a car into a Michigan synagogue while a preschool was in session. She did not mention the incident in her letter, which she said instead was timed to Prejean Boller’s formal ousting by Trump earlier that day.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations praised both Munshi and Prejean Boller on Friday for their “courage.”
“Ms. Prejean Boller and Ms. Munshi fulfilled the commission’s stated purpose by opposing all forms of anti-religious bigotry and standing up for every person’s right to express their religious beliefs, including opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza,” the council said in a statement. “The commission is now clearly meant to protect Israel from criticism, not to protect religious freedom for the American people.”
Munshi is a recent Brown University graduate and onetime director of the Muslim organization Coalition of Virtue. She was embraced by the Christian right after publicly opposing a change in a Maryland public school system’s policy allowing parents to opt their children out of curriculum, including LGBTQ material, that went against their religious beliefs. The policy Munshi protested was eventually taken to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of parents who had challenged the school.
Munshi’s biography on the commission’s website was still active as of Friday. It states, “Sameerah has courageously spoken out against forcing children to learn radical gender ideology in schools.”
Munshi had been outspoken for weeks about her support of Prejean Boller, with whom she was ideologically aligned on Israel, after Prejean Boller’s remarks during the antisemitism hearing caused a firestorm.
Like Prejean Boller, Munshi is also a follower of Candace Owens, the right-wing pundit who has embraced a number of antisemitic conspiracy theories. She praised Owens’ conversation with Jewish pro-Palestinian academic Norman Finkelstein last fall, writing on Instagram that Owens had a “rare willingness to confront uncomfortable truths head-on,” and suggested future guests for Owens to interview.
Munshi has been aligned with Prejean Boller since the fall, when Prejean Boller approached her after Munshi testified to the commission in favor of public schools’ rights to protest Israel. “Carrie has been wonderful. We’ve become pretty good friends at this point, and we’ve shared a lot,” Munshi told Middle East Eye.
On her Instagram before last month’s antisemitism hearing, Munshi wrote that the two of them had pushed the commission to invite “fair witnesses” to the hearing that would have reflected their own perspectives, including Finkelstein, left-wing Israeli academic Miko Peled, anti-Zionist rabbi Yaakov Shapiro, and David Spevak, an American Jewish activist and descendant of Holocaust survivors who has compared Jewish summer camps and cultural programs to the Hitler Youth.
After Prejean Boller’s performance at the hearing, during which she told Jewish witnesses that her Catholic faith compelled her to oppose Israel and Zionism, Munshi defended her from blowback from Jewish groups and the Trump administration. The Wall Street Journal wrote in an editorial that the two “left together and appeared to be texting amid the hearing,” appearing to allege collusion in Prejean Boller’s line of attack.
“Christian views and beliefs were targeted as ‘antisemitic’ for merely expressing concerns about the ongoing conflation between criticism of the state of Israel and anti-Jewish animus,” Munshi wrote on her Substack in February. “During the hearing, an attempt was made by a collection of ‘Israel First’ actors to redefine antisemitism to include all criticism of Israel, smear many concerned citizens as bigots, and even gatekeep what counts as ‘real’ Judaism by confining it to Israel-first Jews.”
Trump established the Religious Liberties Commission last year, with the order’s text stating that it would “offer diverse perspectives on how the Federal Government can defend religious liberty for all Americans.” Munshi was one of three Muslims on the commission and the only Muslim woman; all three were chosen to serve in an advisory capacity, rather than as full commissioners.
In her resignation letter Munshi also said she was resigning in protest of the Trump administration’s war with Iran, which she wrote was being done “at the urging of a genocidal state.”
“I support America over Israel, and unfortunately that means I cannot support Trump or this government,” Munshi continued.
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Oklahoma attorney general accuses officials of rigging vote on proposed Jewish charter school
(JTA) — Oklahoma’s attorney general is accusing a state board of trying to rig the legal fight over a proposed Jewish charter school — a dispute that could open the door for publicly funded religious charter schools across the United States.
Attorney General Gentner Drummond filed a motion this week asking an Oklahoma County district judge to intervene after the Statewide Charter School Board rejected an application to open the Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School, a virtual statewide school that would combine secular studies with Jewish religious instruction.
Drummond alleges that the board engineered its vote so the rejection would focus only on the school’s religious character, strengthening the legal case for the school’s supporters, who are preparing a federal lawsuit challenging Oklahoma’s ban on religious charter schools.
“A state agency that deliberately hobbles its own legal position is not doing its job — it is betraying Oklahoma taxpayers. I will not allow that,” Drummond said in a statement.
He added: “The Board deliberately suppressed those findings to manufacture a cleaner path to federal court. I will not allow this Board to rig the record at taxpayers’ expense.”
Drummond asked the court to order the board to issue a new rejection letter detailing all of the reasons the proposal was deficient.
The dispute centers on the National Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School Foundation, led by former Florida Democratic Rep. Peter Deutsch. The group applied to open a statewide online charter school serving kindergarten through 12th grade students beginning next school year.
The proposal called for a curriculum combining secular coursework with daily Jewish religious studies. If approved, it would have become the nation’s first publicly funded religious charter school.
Jewish groups in Oklahoma have opposed the proposal, saying they prefer not to be thrust into the middle of a debate over church-state separation and that there is little demand for such a school among local Jewish residents.
The charter board voted earlier this week to reject the application, citing a 2024 Oklahoma Supreme Court ruling that charter schools must remain secular.
That ruling overturned a previous effort to open a Catholic charter school, St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School. An appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court ended in a 4–4 tie after Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself, leaving the state court decision in place.
Several board members said the precedent left them no choice but to reject Ben Gamla’s application.
At the same time, the board has signaled it may support the school’s broader constitutional argument in court. The board hired the conservative Christian legal group First Liberty Institute to represent it in the expected litigation and has indicated it could back the school’s position once a lawsuit is filed.
Drummond, who also fought the Catholic charter school proposal, said the legal question about religious charter schools had already been settled by the state courts and insisted his objection to the board’s vote was procedural rather than religious.
Among the issues he says the board improperly left out was a discrepancy in Ben Gamla’s projected enrollment.
Deutsch initially said the online school would serve about 40 high school students, but the formal application projected enrollment of 400 students across grades K-12.
State officials also raised questions about the composition of the school’s governing board. Oklahoma law requires a charter school board to include a parent or grandparent of a student. Ben Gamla listed Brett Farley, executive director of the Catholic Conference of Oklahoma, as its parent representative.
Supporters of the school have said they plan to challenge Oklahoma’s prohibition on religious charter schools in federal court, arguing that excluding religious schools from charter programs violates the Constitution’s protections for religious freedom.
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