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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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BBC Issues Correction After Claiming ‘There Have Been Other Holocausts’ in Response to Complaint
The BBC logo is seen at the entrance at Broadcasting House, the BBC headquarters in central London. Photo by Vuk Valcic / SOPA Images/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has been accused of “trying to downplay or deny the horror of the Holocaust” after the broadcaster claimed “there have been other holocausts [sic]” when responding to a complaint by a reader about an online article.
The BBC posted on its website an article about King Charles III and Queen Camilla meeting with survivors of Nazi persecution to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Jan. 27. According to Jewish News, the article originally stated that Bergen-Belsen concentration camp survivor Mala Tribich “became the first holocaust [sic] survivor to address the cabinet,” and she asked ministers: “How, 81 years after the holocaust [sic], can these people once again be targeted in this way?”
A reader wrote a complaint about the article using a lowercase “h” in the word “Holocaust” and received a response via email in which the BBC rejected the request to make the change but did not explain why. The reader was also told in the email, “Historically there have been other examples of holocausts [sic] elsewhere,” according to Jewish News. The email was reportedly written by an experienced BBC broadcast journalist.
The BBC has since edited the article to feature an uppercase “H” in the word “Holocaust” and added a note to the online article. “Several references to ‘Holocaust,’ which had been initially spelled in this article with a lower case ‘h,’ have been changed to take an upper case ‘H,’ in accordance with the BBC News style guide,” the BBC wrote. A BBC spokesperson further told Jewish News the email to the reader had been “sent in error.”
“All references to the Holocaust in this article should have been capitalized and we have now updated it accordingly and added a note of correction. We will be writing again to the original correspondent,” the spokesperson noted.
The Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) was outraged by the BBC’s error, and said the incident is another example “of an institutionalized dismissal or even hatred of Jews that permeates the BBC’s increasingly agenda-driven reporting.”
“Why is the BBC effectively joining far-right, far-left, and Islamist propagandists and conspiracists in trying to downplay or deny the horror of the Holocaust?” CAA posted on X. “The BBC is peddling softcore Holocaust denial by trivializing the name of this horrific crime.”
“It is difficult to know where the monumental ignorance of the BBC news and complaints divisions ends and their willful revision of history begins,” the organization added. “The Nazi slaughter of the Jews was so extensive that the word genocide had to be invented to describe it. While that word has since been applied to other attempts to wipe out whole peoples, the older word ‘holocaust’ was newly adapted to this event, with which it is uniquely associated.”
The BBC just recently issued an apology after it failed to mention Jews during some of its coverage of International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
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‘You Really Saved Me’: Pianist, Former Hamas Hostage Dedicates Performance to Fellow Survivor Eli Sharabi
Former hostage Alon Ohel reacts as he is welcomed home, after he was discharged from the hospital following his release from captivity in Gaza, where he was held after being kidnapped during the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas, in Lavon, Israel, Oct. 24, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Shir Torem
A musician and former Hamas hostage returned to the stage on Monday night in Israel for a performance and dedicated a song to fellow survivor Eli Sharabi, who was his companion in captivity.
Israeli-Serbian pianist Alon Ohel survived 738 days in captivity in the Gaza Strip after being kidnapped when he tried to flee the Nova Music Festival in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. He was released more than two years later, on Oct. 13, 2025, along with the last remaining 20 living hostages. Ohel was held for some time in Hamas’s tunnels alongside Sharabi, who was abducted from Kibbutz Be’eri on Oct. 7, 2023, and released last February.
Several Israeli artists performed on Monday evening as part of a concert for Ohel at Hangar 11 in Tel Aviv.
At one point during the event, Ohel went on stage and did a solo performance of “Yesh Li Sikui” (“I Have a Chance”) by singer-songwriter Eviatar Banai. Ohel dedicated the song to Sharabi, who was standing in the audience.
“In a way, you really saved me with your approach to life,” Ohel said to Sharabi from on stage.
The pianist then shared memories of sitting with Sharabi in the terror tunnels. “We had backgammon or some card game. We played and laughed a bit, and joked around, and I remember you mentioned my mother’s name, Idit, and in that moment I fell apart,” he said. “I couldn’t handle it. The longing broke me in an instant. I went aside and cried. I just cried and broke down. A longing that never ends.”
“After you let me fall apart, I remember you came over to me,” Ohel added, still addressing Sharabi. “You told me: ‘Alon, you have to pull yourself together. You have to disconnect. This can’t work like this. You broke down, now that is it, you pick yourself up. You’re a big kid and we have one goal: to return to our families no matter what. It’s okay to break down, but we must never lose hope.’”
Ohel then recalled how after a year and a half of being together in the terror tunnels, during which time the two men were chained to each other, Sharabi was taken away and Ohel was held in captivity alone.
Sharabi’s words helped him get through those lonely days, Ohel admitted. He told Sharabi on Monday night: “I continued with the mantras you taught me, the ones you kept drilling into my head: ‘Be mentally strong and optimistic,’ and I added being calm in soul. This is my opportunity to say thank you.”
Monday night’s concert featured many artists, including Idan Amedi, Shlomi Shaban, Alon Eder, Gal Toren, Guy Levy, and Guy Mazig. All proceeds went toward a rehabilitation fund for Ohel.
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In Trump’s instinct to punish and desecrate, a rejection of the values of King David
When is it most essential to speak truth to power: When power is amenable to listening, or when power, confronted, digs in further?
The Bible has a powerful parable about that question in the story of Nathan the Prophet and King David. And as President Donald Trump’s administration showcases a tendency to punish those they’ve already wronged — like pro-Palestinian Columbia University protest leader Mahmoud Khalil and Renée Good’s widow — it’s of fresh relevance in the United States today.
After King David sleeps with Bathsheba and has her husband killed, God is displeased, and sends Nathan to confront the king.
Nathan tells the king the story of two men. One is rich, with large flocks and herds, and one poor, with just one small lamb who “used to share his morsel of bread, drink from his cup, and nestle in his bosom; it was like a daughter to him.” When a traveler came, the rich man served him not one of his own flock, but the poor man’s one little lamb.
This story enrages the king, who vows, “As God lives, the man who did this deserves to die!”
Bad news, Nathan tells him: King David is that man. What has he done with all his power and riches? Taken another man’s wife, and had him killed.
The king, hearing this, admits his guilt. The act of admitting shame sets a crucial precedent for the Jewish people. Because David takes stock of himself and what he has done, and accepts his punishment — the death of his first child with Bathsheba — he is allowed to move forward.
In our modern U.S., we must ask: What would have happened if David had responded to Nathan’s story by digging his heels in? If he had tried to blame Bathsheba’s dead husband or desecrate his memory, would that make what Nathan did futile or unimportant?
Since the beginning of Trump’s second term one year ago, we have repeatedly seen his administration fail to live up to King David’s example. Time and again, the public has served the role of Nathan, beseeching Trump to look at how he deploys his wealth and power, and do better. And time and again, we’ve been met with not just defiance, but with an insistence on pursuing the original course of action with more vehemence.
We have seen that with Khalil, whom the Trump administration continues to try to deport, despite the fact that he holds a green card and has no criminal record.
We have seen it in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom the administration mistakenly deported to El Salvador. Instead of apologizing profusely to Garcia and his family for the trauma they suffered due to the government’s ineptitude, the administration responded by making retroactively building a criminal case against him a top priority.
We’ve seen it in the administration’s efforts to investigate the widow of Renée Good after Good’s killing by an ICE agent set off national protests. To put a finer point on it: They shot and killed a woman and then reportedly decided to try to prove it was she who was guilty.
Most recently, we’ve seen it in the federal government’s motion to end asylum claims for 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his family. A picture of Ramos being detained, wearing a blue bunny hat and looking terrified, sent shockwaves through the country. He and his father recently returned to Minnesota after being arrested and sent to a detention center in Texas.
The administration’s response to the righting of this grievous wrong — the detention of a tiny, traumatized child — was not to, say, change its policy of arresting, detaining, and trying to deport children, but to try to further punish that little boy’s family.
It’s as if, on hearing, “that man is you!,” King David decided to open an inquiry into the crimes of Bathsheba’s late husband — with no evidence that any such crimes existed. Over and over again, Trump and his team respond to our efforts to speak truth to their power by finding some other poor man’s lamb to slaughter.
Which brings us back to Nathan.
If King David had rejected Nathan’s message, I don’t think that would have made the message itself less important. I think it would have simply meant Nathan must continue to try, that he must keep insisting that the king should recognize his abuse of power, and do his best to make it right.
That might have felt pointless to Nathan. I think it can feel pointless to all of us today. It can feel that, for every good thing that happens — like the release of a 5-year-old from the horrors of detention — the administration seems determined to be doubly cruel. For every horrific act they commit by mistake, they seem determined to carry out a more horrific one on purpose.
But it isn’t pointless. Our would-be king may not heed the call, but others do. Prosecutors keep resigning instead of trying to punish the innocent. Judges continue to name the administration’s abuses, and work to undo them. Jewish organizations continue to reject the idea that the detention of pro-Palestinian students for exercising free speech is a matter of national security.
Trump may never admit, in Nathan’s words, that he is that man. But the rest of us can keep insisting: not only on the innocence of those being hurt in this country, but on the guilt of all of those who are hurting them.
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