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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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The post Translating ‘tzedakah’ for Marylanders: Sen. Ben Cardin’s long Jewish goodbye appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Texas Gov. Greg Abbott Announces Progress in Legal Battle to Declare CAIR a Terrorist Group
Governor of Texas Greg Abbott attends the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) USA 2026 at the Gaylord Texan Resort and Convention Center, in Grapevine, Texas, US, March 27, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Callaghan O’Hare
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) on Wednesday announced that a US federal court granted major portions of Texas’s discovery requests against the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), representing significant progress in the state’s legal case to designate the controversial advocacy group as a terrorist organization.
The approved request means that CAIR will have to hand over information including donor lists, award recipients, and records tied to travel by longtime CAIR executive director Nihad Awad to countries described by Abbott as “hosting Islamic terror.”
“Progress in my legal fight against CAIR,” Abbott posted on X. “I demanded CAIR give us its donor list, donee list, and details for Nihad Awad’s travel to 9 countries hosting Islamic terror. A federal court granted my request.”
The ruling, issued by the US District Court for the Western District of Texas, marks one of the most serious legal setbacks CAIR has faced in years as Republican officials intensify scrutiny of the organization’s funding networks and alleged foreign connections.
Court documents show the judge granted in part motions from Abbott and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton seeking extensive discovery from CAIR entities. Among the requests approved by the court were demands for documents identifying donors who gave $5,000 or more over the past decade.
The order also states that donor records with names redacted would be “insufficient,” signaling the court’s willingness to force disclosure of information CAIR has long argued should remain private.
Abbott has accused CAIR of operating surreptitiously while exerting significant political influence across the country. His administration has argued that Texans deserve transparency regarding the organization’s donors, overseas relationships, and internal financial networks.
The legal proceedings began in November, when Abbott formally designated CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist organizations under state law, citing in part what officials described as longstanding ideological and operational ties with Islamist movements hostile to the US and its allies.
“The Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR have long made their goals clear: to forcibly impose Sharia law and establish Islam’s ‘mastership of the world,’” Abbott said in a statement announcing the move. “These radical extremists are not welcome in our state and are now prohibited from acquiring any real property interest in Texas.”
Abbott’s proclamation described CAIR as a “successor organization” to the Muslim Brotherhood and noted the FBI called it a “front group” for “Hamas and its support network.” The document also outlined the history of the organizations and their historical associations with figures and networks tied to Hamas, an internationally designated terrorist group.
CAIR has denied any ties to terrorism and portrayed the Texas investigation as an attack on Muslim civil rights advocacy.
But critics of CAIR have increasingly pointed to the organization’s history of controversy surrounding extremist rhetoric and its past scrutiny by federal investigators. Awad himself drew backlash after publicly expressing support for the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre, saying he was “happy to see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land.”
In the 2000s, CAIR was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing case. Politico noted in 2010 that “US District Court Judge Jorge Solis found that the government presented ‘ample evidence to establish the association’” of CAIR with Hamas.
According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), “some of CAIR’s current leadership had early connections with organizations that are or were affiliated with Hamas.” CAIR has disputed the accuracy of the ADL’s claim and asserted that it “unequivocally condemn[s] all acts of terrorism, whether carried out by al-Qa’ida, the Real IRA, FARC, Hamas, ETA, or any other group designated by the US Department of State as a ‘Foreign Terrorist Organization.’”
CAIR leaders have also found themselves embroiled in further controversy since Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities in southern Israel, in some cases for associating with US-designated terrorists.
The latest court ruling does not resolve the broader lawsuit, which remains ongoing, but it hands Abbott and Paxton a major procedural victory in a case that is increasingly drawing national attention.
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Denmark Sees Historically High Antisemitism for Third Consecutive Year
People take part in an anti-Israel demonstration in Copenhagen, Denmark, Oct. 4, 2025. Photo: Ritzau Scanpix/Emil Nicolai Helms via REUTERS
Antisemitism in Denmark has remained at historically high levels for the third consecutive year, according to newly released data reflecting a deeply entrenched climate of hostility toward Jews and Israelis across Europe, marked by harassment, vandalism, and targeted attacks.
On Thursday, the Danish Jewish Community’’ Department for Mapping and Registering Antisemitic Incidents released its annual report documenting 199 antisemitic incidents in 2025 — the second-highest figure since records began in 2012.
“Unfortunately, antisemitism in Denmark is not diminishing — it has become normalized at a level we have never witnessed before,” Ina Rosen, chairperson of the local Jewish community group, said in a statement.
“This casts a dark shadow over Jewish life in Denmark, but antisemitism is not only a Jewish problem — it is a societal one. No democracy can accept a reality in which an entire group of citizens is subjected to such intense hatred,” she continued.
More antisemitic incidents have been recorded in Denmark since the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, than in the previous decade combined, reflecting a sharp and sustained rise in hostility with no signs of abating.
While the data reflected a slight decline from the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 atrocities, with incidents peaking at 207 in 2024, the figures remained far above pre-war levels, which totaled just nine incidents overall.
Denmark’s Jewish population was estimated at 6,400 Jews in 2023.
All across the country, the study pointed to a growing tendency to hold Jews and Israelis collectively responsible for the policies and actions of the State of Israel, with more than half of all reported incidents (52 percent) blaming Jewish individuals, institutions, or organizations for events in the Middle East.
This trend was even more pronounced online, where it rose to 66 percent, reflecting an intensified pattern of scapegoating in digital spaces.
A large majority of the incidents — roughly 70 percent — targeted individuals or institutions visibly identified as Jewish, many of whom received hate messages, death threats, and demands to publicly distance themselves from Israel.
“This is the most common form of antisemitism Danish Jews are experiencing today,” Rosen said. “More and more, merely identifying as Jewish or displaying Jewish symbols is treated as a political stance for which individuals are held accountable. Regardless of how it is expressed, it amounts to an unacceptable imposition of collective guilt on an entire community.”
“We are talking about Jewish fellow citizens who, every day, have to weigh how openly they can show who they are,” she continued. “It is unacceptable for those affected, and it is also a loss for Danish society’s diversity when citizens feel compelled to conceal their identity.”
Among the reported cases were seven incidents of violence, assault, and other forms of physical harassment targeting Jews, alongside 24 cases involving Jewish children and young people.
The newly released report also warned that this increasingly hostile environment has become entrenched in schools and other educational institutions, citing repeated incidents in which public school students have been subjected to Nazi salutes, called “Jew pigs,” and told that “the world would be better without Jews” and that “all Jews must die.”
Given that many victims choose not to come forward, the study pointed to what is likely a far broader wave of antisemitic abuse than the official figures captured.
According to a survey released last year by the Danish Institute for Human Rights, 83 percent of Jewish citizens in Denmark said they alter their behavior in public because they are Jewish, while 62 percent reported hiding Jewish symbols.
In December, Denmark’s government unveiled an $18 million, five-year plan to combat antisemitism through 2030, focusing on security, education, and research, as the country’s Jewish community continued to face a wave of targeted attacks and hostility.
Building on the country’s first national plan to combat antisemitism from 2022, the new initiative focuses on boosting security for Jewish institutions, combating online hate, and introducing programs for children and young people.
As a new addition to the previous plan, the recently released program will appoint an Education Ministry coordinator to fight antisemitism in schools and establish an association to combat antisemitic hate crimes.
Other measures will include expanded educational programs, giving all upper secondary schools the opportunity to apply for study trips that teach students about the Holocaust and antisemitism.
The plan also includes the creation of the Weinberger Institute, a research center focused on hate crimes, led by Jonathan Fischer, a former vice president of the Jewish Community of Denmark.
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Netanyahu deploys AI videos as political weapon, aimed at voter fears of Arab power
As election season in Israel heats up, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and members of his government are deploying a charged weapon against their political opponents aiming to overthrow them: AI-generated viral videos.
In recent weeks, Netanyahu and key allies have taken to social media to post satirical content on their social media accounts, depicting their leading opponents, Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett, as being controlled by Arab-Israeli puppetmasters.
One viral video posted by the prime minister last week, with over a million views, is captioned “taking off the masks.” It shows a smiling Bennett and Lapid embracing before peeling off their faces to reveal those of prominent Arab-Israeli political leaders Mansour Abbas and Ahmad Tibi.
מורידים את המסכות pic.twitter.com/IgFDWXp96N
— Benjamin Netanyahu – בנימין נתניהו (@netanyahu) April 29, 2026
After Bennett and Lapid announced in April that they would run jointly against Netanyahu in the upcoming fall elections, Israeli political Twitter flooded with AI-generated content on this theme, which goes for the jugular on a political vulnerability for Bennett: his past inclusion of Abbas’ Arab Ra’am party in his governing coalition.
One image posted by Likud, Netanyahu’s party, featured Bennett and Lapid depicted as children sitting obediently in the back seat of a car as Abbas drives. The photo is accompanied by the caption: “In any case, Bennett and Lapid will go again with the Muslim Brotherhood, the terrorism supporters.”
גם ביחד זה ברור – הנהג הוא מנסור.
לא משנה איך השמאל מחלק את הקולות שלו.
בכל מקרה בנט ולפיד ילכו שוב עם ברית האחים המוסלמים תומכי הטרור. pic.twitter.com/iYFIZQ8QhJ
— הליכוד (@Likud_Party) April 26, 2026
These AI videos reflect a growing post–Oct. 7 trend in Israeli politics: accusing one’s political opponents of being aligned with Arab parties as a way to delegitimize them.
Dr. Arik Rudnitzky, a researcher in the Arab Society in Israel program at the Israel Democracy Institute, said the trauma Israelis experienced after Oct. 7 has left a profound mark on the Jewish public. That fear, he said, is now being actively mobilized in political messaging.
“The post–Oct. 7 discourse is so influential in Israeli politics that it dictates everything,” Rudnitzky said. On Tuesday, Finance Minister Betzalel Smootrich went as far as to say that Naftali Bennett’s decision to include the Islamist Ra’am party in the 2021-2022 government was worse than the Netanyahu government’s failures tied to Hamas’s attacks on Oct. 7. This, despite the fact that Mansour Abbas has said that Netanyahu tried to court him into joining his coalition in 2021, though Netanyahu has denied this.
According to Rudnitzky, the implicit message is that Israel’s Arab parties are dangerous. The argument is that they are not Zionist (and some Arab parties are even explicitly anti-Zionist). In the aftermath of Oct. 7, while some Arab-Israeli political leaders condemned violence from both Hamas and the Israel Defense Forces on civilians, they stopped short of referring to Hamas as a terror organization. Some also failed to condemn the murder of Israeli soldiers on that day.
Now, Netanyahu’s government has taken to framing the choice for voters as existential. “Either you are with the most experienced prime minister in Israel’s history, or you are willing to gamble and put Israel at risk by electing Bennett and Lapid,” said Rudnitzky.
The use of AI by Israeli politicians, Rudnitzky added, makes that message more visceral. “It looks real, it goes straight to the back of your mind, and it hits a nerve.”
Bennett, for his part, has tried to distance himself from this narrative, stating after he announced that he would be running against Netanyahu, “The Arab parties are not Zionist, and therefore we will not rely on them.”
But the videos are taking their toll. Earlier this year, Bennett filed a police report after the Likud X account posted a doctored image that depicted Bennett celebrating with Arab leaders, with the men all raising their clasped hands in celebration. Bennett called the image “malicious forgery.”
Other politicians have deployed similar messaging tactics — against Netanyahu. In February, Avigdor Liberman, a right-wing critic of the prime minister, posted an AI-generated image of Netanyahu holding hands with Abbas in front of a bouquet of heart-shaped flowers, captioned: “Happy Valentine’s Day.”
יום אהבה שמח❤ pic.twitter.com/Sel1CkURFn
— אביגדור ליברמן (@AvigdorLiberman) February 14, 2026
In response, Netanyahu posted an actual photo of Lieberman meeting with Abbas with the caption: “Lieberman published a doctored AI photo of the PM holding hands with Mansour Abbas. So, Avigdor, here’s a real, unedited photo of you and Mansour Abbas.”
Lieberman then shared 10 posts of Netanyahu meeting with various Arab leaders since the 1990s, including former PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat and current Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
According to Rudnitzky, such wrestling-ring attacks have become normalized since Oct. 7, aimed at Jewish politicians and voters. “This is not about delegitimizing Arab voters,” he said. “The target is Naftali Bennett — not Mansour Abbas.”
A controversial pragmatist
Arab parties have long represented Israel’s Arab minority in the Knesset but historically remained outside governing coalitions. For decades, this arrangement — Arab parties supporting from the outside or remaining in opposition — was broadly acceptable to both sides. Arab politicians often avoided joining coalitions for ideological reasons, while Jewish parties largely viewed their inclusion as politically untenable.
That changed in 2021, when Abbas made history by joining the winning coalition led by Bennett and Lapid. That decision positioned him as a pragmatist, willing to work with Jewish parties to secure gains for Arab citizens.
In the aftermath of Oct. 7, Abbas issued the most explicit condemnations of Hamas among Arab Israeli political leaders. He has also said that “the state of Israel was born as a Jewish state, and it will remain one,” a rare acknowledgment of Israel’s identity in those terms. Still, no Arab-majority party in Israel defines itself as Zionist.
While it is considered to be the most moderate of the Arab parties in Israel, Abbas’ Ra’am is an Islamist party that emerged from the Islamic Movement in Israel and the Shura Council — organizations tied to the Muslim Brotherhood. Abbas has increasingly sought to distance the party from those groups and has denied any affiliation with the Brotherhood.
Forming a governing coalition in Israel requires at least 61 seats out of 120, and several polls have suggested that any viable opposition to Netanyahu would likely need Arab party support to reach that threshold. But reliance on Arab parties to form a coalition has become more contentious since Oct. 7.
According to the Democracy Index poll, 72% percent of the Jewish public in Israel opposes the inclusion of Arab parties in the governing coalition. Opposition extends beyond the right: 43% of centrist voters and 20% of left-wing voters also oppose such coalitions. Support has declined significantly since before Oct. 7, when roughly 36% of Jewish Israelis backed including Arab parties in government, compared to just 27% today.
Hence the opening for Bibi and his video blitz. “We’ve seen an escalating political discourse over the past several years. There are no more holy cows,” said Rudnitzky. “If you want to mobilize the entire Jewish public and you know that you are in an inferior position in the polls … this is the way to take the demons out of the bottle.”
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