Uncategorized
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.”
—
The post Translating ‘tzedakah’ for Marylanders: Sen. Ben Cardin’s long Jewish goodbye appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
He reconnected with Judaism as an adult. With his art, he hopes others do the same.
Bruce David’s magnum opus is a psychedelic lithograph depicting practically the entire Torah. Over eight months, David filled it with a plethora of hidden symbols: If you look closely, you can see Joshua blowing a shofar, which hugs the Israeli flag. Squint even more and you’ll notice Joshua’s face is the flared end of an even bigger shofar that encompasses the Ten Commandments, a shofar made up of dozens of small people, seven of whom hold flames as if making a human menorah.
To understand every hidden image in just this one painting would take more words than I have space for. David gave me the “short version” of the piece’s story on Zoom — it still took six minutes.
Although David has now spent decades making Jewish art — prints, mosaics, stained glass and metal works — and exhibiting it across the country, it wasn’t what he had anticipated doing with his life. David doesn’t have any formal art training and for several years, he lost touch with his Judaism.
“Oftentimes I’ll refer to myself as a deeply flawed holy man wannabe,” David told me over Zoom from his house in Bloomington, Indiana. “But I always had this spiritual pull.”
David grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, with a Reform father and a mother from an Orthodox family. His Orthodox grandmother, Bess Harris — who he described as a force to be reckoned with — was a particular influence on him.
“I really learned my Jewish heart from her and her love of God,” David said. “She was involved with starting a Jewish day school, a Jewish nursing home, the synagogue, and she would lead trips to Israel.”
But traditional religious practice didn’t speak to him when he was a kid. He told me that one time he even climbed out of the window during Hebrew school to go play basketball.
Years later, his wife Diane was the one who helped him find new ways to connect with Judaism. Although she was raised Catholic, Diane was curious about Judaism. David needed to refresh himself on the answers.
“We started looking at the different aspects of Judaism and different things started to make sense,” David told me. “Shabbat made sense — you know, everybody needs a time to rest, recharge. Yom Kippur makes sense as a time to forgive and be forgiven. Rosh Hashanah to start again. Sukkot to get out and celebrate and get close to nature.”
When the couple met, David’s job was making deliveries for his grandfather’s wholesale store in Louisville. For David’s 30th birthday, Diane gave him a set of pigment pencils and the art started flowing out of him. Many of his pieces are concerned with biblical stories — like his mosaic of Jonah emerging onto the shores of Nineveh or his rainbow colored print of Balaam and his donkey — and he refers to them as “visual midrash.”
Unsure what to do with his art, David went to the Hillel at Indiana University Bloomington to see if the rabbi had any ideas. The rabbi connected him with art professor Mazelle Van Buskirk who was taken with David’s work. She arranged for an exhibit at IU’s School of Fine Arts, making him the first community artist to be given such an honor and kicking off his career.
He has presented his art at Jewish schools and exhibited it at events like the National Hadassah Conference, the Cincinnati Jewish Folk Festival, and the Coalition for Alternatives to Jewish Education. His work has been on the cover of books and Jewish publications. Many of the events that have had the greatest impact on David’s life were unplanned.
“We’ve always lived our lives on miracles,” David told me.
Among these, David said, was Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, “the Singing Rabbi” who wrote hundreds of liturgical melodies in the 20th century, conducting a (planned) conversion for Diane and an (unplanned) wedding ceremony for the couple in the 80s.
“We went to the mikvah for the conversion,” David told me. “And then he tells us ‘Oh by the way we’re going to marry you Saturday night after Shabbat.’”
Another miracle happened when David met a couple looking for someone to manage 29 acres in Bloomington overlooking Monroe Lake. Nature lovers, the couple quickly took the opportunity to live somewhere they could connect with the earth. David’s admiration for natural forms can also be found in much of his art; the shapes tend to flow and bend.
Over the 46 years that the couple has lived on their property, they’ve turned it into a home base for their Jewish worship and educational group Light of the Nations, which conducts lessons at various synagogues and JCCs through art and music. They host parties for Sukkot and the solar eclipse on their huge lawn, welcoming dozens of visitors.
David said they wanted their home to be a “place where people come out and get close to nature in life and slow down.”
Seventy-five years old and battling blood cancer, David is now spending his time focusing on helping people connect to Judaism in a holistic way and see the beauty that brought him back to religion. He’s slowed down on exhibiting his art, instead working on making sure Light of the Nations’ mission can continue once he is gone and that his art will find a home.
David hopes that people recognize in his art “that there’s this amazing, incredible life force influencing all creation.”
The post He reconnected with Judaism as an adult. With his art, he hopes others do the same. appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Metropolitan Police investigating abuse of Jewish attendees at London Pride
(JTA) — London’s Metropolitan Police launched an investigation Monday into antisemitic abuse at a Pride parade after videos and pictures circulated on social media showed Jewish participants enduring taunts at Saturday’s event.
The police department said in a statement that officers were “aware of videos circulating online that show antisemitic verbal abuse directed towards attendees” at the parade in central London and that footage was being reviewed to assess whether criminal offenses had been committed. The department added that it “continues to work hard to tackle hate crimes of all types.”
Videos shared online show people carrying rainbow flags incorporating the Star of David being confronted by individuals shouting “Free Palestine.” The harassment escalated with attendees shouting, “Go back to your Zionist homeland,” “You kill Arab children, you kill gay children,” “F*** you, Jew,” and “How many babies did you kill?”
The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reached out to Pride in London for comment. The group had not replied by press time.
The incident comes amid heightened concern over antisemitism in Britain since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, with a record number of antisemitic incidents reported over the past two years. It also comes as Pride celebrations around the world have been roiled by tensions over Israel and antisemitism.
Pride in London drew tens of thousands of participants and visitors to the Soho neighborhood in the British capital. Some Jewish LGBTQ+ organizations have in recent years chosen not to participate in Pride, citing hostility towards Zionist Jews. But this year, around 150 people marched as part of a Jewish bloc at the event.
Organizers said the return this year followed discussions with Pride in London over Jewish inclusion and commitments that organizers would undertake antisemitism awareness training in partnership with the Community Security Trust, the main security consultant to the Jewish community. Jewish LGBTQ group Keshet UK stated earlier this year that the measures were intended to help ensure Jewish LGBTQ+ participants could march “safely and openly” following concerns raised after Oct. 7.
It was not clear whether the Jewish marchers who endured the abuse were part of the official Jewish bloc – accounts from marchers who stayed with the Jewish bloc were generally positive.
“A few people came and chanted ‘free, free, Palestine,’” Israeli author and LGBTQ+ activist Hen Mazzig told JTA. “They were passing through. And there was another person who was at a cafe and then they came by and they were just staring at us.”
Mazzig shared footage from the event on X, writing, ”My pride is not affected by the opinions of others. I am gay, I am Jewish, and I’m here to stay. Am Yisrael chai.”
Mazzig splits his time between London and Tel Aviv, because his husband is British. He told JTA in a phone interview that Saturday’s incidents “were scary, especially when a Pride parade is supposed to be inclusive.”
Mazzig said that since Oct, 7, circumstances have been exceptionally challenging for the British Jewish community “but specifically for LGBTQ youth that are being forced to choose between their Jewish identity and their queer identity.”
Mazzig claimed that Jewish marchers are not accepted unless they specify that they are anti-Zionist. “Every statement of solidarity with LGBTQ Jews seems to come with a ‘but,’” he said. ‘We support you, but not if you’re physically Jewish, not if you’re supporting Israel. You have to renounce half of your identity first.’ That’s not equality.”
In advance of Saturday’s event, some 650 Met police officers were deployed to enforce “zero tolerance” on hate crimes and to ensure that attendees could “safely and securely” enjoy the parade.
When JTA asked the Metropolitan police why at least two policemen appeared to stand by as Jews were subject to abuse, the Met requested that JTA provide the video in question. After being supplied with the video, the Met later told JTA that it had nothing further to add at this stage but would provide an update if it did.
Mazzig said the Met police should consider the abuse at the parade “shameful and it should alarm everyone.”
He added, “I hope that we stop debating whether or not antisemitism is real and accept it. And that communities that are supposed to be inclusive and pluralistic start taking action.”
The post Metropolitan Police investigating abuse of Jewish attendees at London Pride appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Israel’s diaspora minister calls Erdogan a ‘grotesque hybrid of Hitler and Sinwar’
(JTA) — Israel’s Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli compared Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to Adolf Hitler and slain Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in a post on X on Monday.
“We all know how narcissistic power-obsessed fanatics like you begin and how they end. The Jewish people have never feared mere flesh and blood, from Pharaoh until today,” Chikli wrote. “You are nothing but a pathetic blood soaked zero who history will soon forget.”
In the post, Chikli accused the Turkish leader of being a “patron of Hamas and ISIS” and described him as a “grotesque hybrid of Hitler and Sinwar” alongside an AI image of Erdogan in front of a Nazi flag.
Chikli’s post was in response to an address by Erdogan last month, in which the Turkish leader called Zionism a “genocidal occupying expansionist ideology” and said the “struggle” against Zionism was for the “collective survival of ourselves and our nation.”
Long-standing tensions between Turkey and Israel stoked by the war in Gaza have escalated in recent weeks, amid increasing Israeli concerns over the tight ties between Ankara and Washington and the possible sale of advanced American F-35 fighter jets to Turkey. Erdogan, who has consistently voiced support for Hamas, has been one of Israel’s most outspoken international critics.
Chikli’s post followed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s blistering attack against Erdogan during an interview on “Fox & Friends” on Fox News Monday. Netanyahu said Turkey was “governed by a man who calls openly for the annihilation of Israel…and talks openly about conquering Jerusalem.”
The Israeli leader warned against the sale of weaponry to Ankara, portraying Turkey as an aggressive country that didn’t help the U.S. battle Iran. He spoke in advance of U.S. President Donald Trump’s trip to Ankara late Tuesday for a two-day summit of NATO.
“For a regime infected by the Muslim Brotherhood, an extreme movement that hates America and chants ‘death to America’ from that side of the spectrum, I don’t think they should be given F-35’s or the engines for their fighter jets,” Netanyahu told Fox News.
Such a sale would “upset the power balance in the Middle East, which is ultimately guaranteed by Israeli air superiority and … by America’s posture in the Middle East,” Netanyahu said.
Relations between the two regional powers have also been aggravated by the Israeli government’s June 28 decision to recognize the Armenian genocide by the Ottoman Empire during and immediately after World War I.
Turkey has condemned Israel’s recognition of the Armenian genocide. It’s a move so diplomatically controversial that to date, only some 33 countries, aside from Israel, have taken this step, including the U.S. in 2021.
According to Politico, Erdogan said in a public address last week, “We do not give the slightest heed to the slanders about our country from the murder network that has the blood of 73,000 innocent Gazans, most of them children and women, on its hands.”
Israel’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Gideon Saar, also took aim at Turkey’s foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, during a press conference in Jerusalem Monday, decrying Fidan’s comments to CNN Türk on Friday in which he said that Israel had become a “burden that humanity can no longer bear.”
“The remarks by Turkey’s Foreign Minister are a clear call for genocide,” Saar said. “The Jewish people know all too well what happens when such words are allowed to go unanswered. The first step on the road to genocide is dehumanization.”
The post Israel’s diaspora minister calls Erdogan a ‘grotesque hybrid of Hitler and Sinwar’ appeared first on The Forward.
