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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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How a 19th century murder introduced Americans to a Jewish funeral
In June 1857, newspapers from Philadelphia to St. Louis carried reports of a shocking crime in western Massachusetts. Isaac Jackson, a 17- or 18-year-old German Jewish peddler from Westfield, was shot and robbed while traveling his route between the towns of Westfield and Russell. His body was dragged to the bank of a river, concealed beneath stones and debris, and not discovered until the following day. Contemporary newspaper stories described it as one of western Massachusetts’ most notorious murders in half a century.
The crime quickly attracted national attention as accounts proliferated, sometimes differing on details such as Jackson’s age. Reporters described the search for his body, the arrest of Charles Jones, known to readers as the “ministerial burglar,” and the growing public anger that led some spectators to openly discuss lynching the accused before he could stand trial.
The attention came decades before mass migration from Eastern Europe transformed American Jewish life. The country’s Jewish population numbered no more than 200,000. Yet Jackson’s murder became national news, and newspapers far beyond Massachusetts used the story of his funeral to explain Jewish burial and mourning customs to their readers.
After Jackson’s body was recovered, it was taken to Hartford, Connecticut, for burial, “there being no synagogue at Westfield.” His funeral was held at Touro Hall, home of Congregation Beth Israel, which had only recently converted the former North Baptist Church into a synagogue with the help of a bequest from the Jewish philanthropist Judah Touro.
According to an account first published in the Hartford Times and widely reprinted in newspapers across the country, the body was washed and clothed in white linen garments “expressly made by Jewish women,” who considered it a final act of kindness toward a fellow Jew. Earth was placed beneath the head “to indicate that all cometh from the earth and returneth thither again.” The head was turned toward the east, symbolizing, the newspaper explained, “the great reverence of the Israelite towards the land of his nationality,” and the hope that “as the sun rises to revivify all creation so will the dead finally rise to everlasting life.”
As the coffin was lowered, those gathered prayed, “May the soul of the departed come to its resting place in peace.” Each mourner then placed earth upon the grave before reciting the words, “Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return.”
The funeral itself was not the only moment that revealed how Isaac’s family mourned.
When word reached Westfield that a peddler had been murdered along the road to Russell, “there was a great rush in that direction, and at least one hundred persons were promptly there. Among them were Coroner Abbott, Justice Lewis, and other prominent citizens.” Isaac’s brother Joseph also hurried to the scene. At first, according to one newspaper account, he refused to believe the victim could be his younger sibling. But when he saw the wagon, he recognized it immediately and “burst into tears.”
As the body was recovered from the stream, Joseph, the newspaper reported, performed what it described as his “first duty as a Jew,” removing from Isaac’s pockets the tefillin he carried “to bind around his forehead and arm each morning upon rising.”
The newspapers also offered small glimpses of the life that had ended so suddenly. Isaac was the youngest of four brothers, whose family operated a store in Westfield and maintained traveling peddler wagons throughout the surrounding countryside. On the morning of the murder, he left carrying dry goods, jewelry and ready-made clothing. Among the possessions later identified by his brother was his watch.
The burial rites did not end with the funeral.
Several weeks later, the Springfield Daily Republican published a brief account, later reprinted in the Boston Evening Transcript, about one of Isaac’s brothers while he was again traveling as a peddler with the same wagon. As he unfolded a piece of cloth for a customer, he noticed a single drop of blood. Overcome with emotion, the newspaper reported, he “cried for a few moments like a child,” then folded the cloth and declared that he must return to Hartford so the bloodstained cloth could be buried with his brother. According to the account, everything bearing Isaac’s blood that had been found after the murder had already been interred with him, per Jewish tradition.
Isaac Jackson still rests in Hartford’s Zion Hill Cemetery. Much of his life has been lost to history. But the newspapers that reported his murder preserved something that endures: a careful record of the customs through which his family and community buried him.
The post How a 19th century murder introduced Americans to a Jewish funeral appeared first on The Forward.
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How an obscure centrist politician could be key to defeating Netanyahu in October
(JTA) —
TEL AVIV — At a barbecue on a Netanya rooftop earlier this month, MK Yoav Segalovitz, a politician most people outside Israel have never heard of, told his fellow members of the leading opposition party Yesh Atid that he would not be running with them in the upcoming October election.
It’s a decision that could reshape Israel’s political landscape and determine whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will lose the October 27 election.
That’s because Segalovitz, 67, who formerly headed the Israel Police’s Investigations and Intelligence Division, is planning to join Ra’am, an Arab party that was the kingmaker in the 2021 elections, pollster Yousef Makladeh told Jewish Telegraphic Agency, describing his conversation with Segalovitz prior to leaving the party. Makladeh added that the move had been under discussion for months.
In an official statement last week, Ra’am’s chairman Mansour Abbas and Segalovitz said they had met and held a “cordial and positive” discussion about the possibility of Segalovitz joining Ra’am’s slate in the upcoming Knesset elections. The two agreed to continue direct talks in an effort to advance the matter.
If that indeed happens, it would send a seismic shock though the Israeli political system on two fronts: Segalovitz would be the first lawmaker in decades to leave a Zionist party for an Arab-led party; and that party would be in a position to join other opposition groups to pry control of the next Israeli government away from Netanyahu.
The willingness of Ra’am and two Zionist slates — Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid party and Naftali Bennett’s New Right party — to join a coalition in 2021 led by Bennett and Lapid provided the needed seats to push Netanyahu out of power after 12 consecutive years as prime minister. The first coalition in Israeli history to take office with the support of an Arab party was unprecedented –and viewed by many as a historic breakthrough in Jewish-Arab political cooperation.
The question in 2026 is: Could it happen again?
This time around, the prospect of an Arab party in the coalition prompts more wariness among many Israelis, and Bennett and Lapid have both ruled out forming a coalition with one.
Israeli polls have consistently shown that neither Netanyahu’s coalition nor the bloc of opposition Jewish parties led by his chief rival, former IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot, is on track to secure the 61 seats needed to form a government. The opposition’s Jewish parties have consistently polled at approximately 58 to 60 seats, while Netanyahu’s bloc trails with roughly 50.
That deadlock has thrust Ra’am, led by MK Mansour Abbas, back into the spotlight. Most recent polls give the party between five and seven seats, potentially making it the kingmaker once again.
Founded in 1996, Ra’am, whose name is an Arabic acronym meaning United Arab List, has roots in the Southern Branch of the Islamic Movement and had until recently been a religious Arab party. It had been part of the traditional bloc of Arab parties in the Knesset until Abbas split away, as part of his strategy to shift the party’s focus from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to practical achievements for Israel’s Arab society.
Makladeh, who has conducted surveys for Channel 13 and political parties across Israel’s political spectrum, describes Ra’am as “the missing piece of the puzzle” that could lift the opposition bloc “to 62 or 63 seats.”
In 2021, however, there was a shedding of some of the longstanding reluctance to consider an Arab party in the coalition, for those who saw the political necessity of doing so in order to remove Netanyahu from office. Netanyahu himself had reportedly spoken with Abbas about some form of a political partnership. This time around, the prospect of an Arab party in the coalition prompts more wariness among many Israelis, particularly this early in the election cycle when it is unclear if it will be absolutely necessary to do so.
Political commentator Nadav Perry, host of one of Israel’s most influential political podcasts, says that the party’s ties to conservative Muslim religious leadership, together with the rapid collapse of the 2021 government and the trauma of Oct. 7, 2023, had effectively pushed the idea of Ra’am joining another coalition with Jewish parties back to “square one.”
The addition of Segalovitz to Ra’am could change that by making the party more palatable to the Israeli public and could expand its voting base.
Ameer Bisharat, the former director-general of the National Committee of Arab Local Council Heads, added that Arab Israelis are “hungry for change.”
“Change can come through political power, and Abbas understands that very well. He is trying to create that political power,” Bisharat said
JTA reached out to both Ra’am and Segalovitz for comment. Segalovitz’s spokesperson declined to comment, while Ra’am did not respond to a request for comment.
Segalovitz has been a member of the Lapid-led Yesh Atid party, a centrist bloc which emphasizes secular rights and opposition to draft exemptions for haredi Orthodox yeshiva students, since 2016. He later served as Deputy Minister of Internal Security in the Bennett-Lapid government. In that role, Segalovitz was the public face of the government’s efforts to combat violent crime in Israel’s Arab communities. During his tenure, the number of murders in Arab communities declined sharply before rising dramatically again after the government fell.
Bisharat, who worked with Segalovitz and now advises the public policy department at the Accord Institute on Arab voting patterns, said the Bennett-Lapid government was “successful” for Arab society. It helped build trust between the government and Arab citizens and it presided during a decline in violent crime in the Arab communities in Israel.
Under Segalovitz’s leadership, a special plan was developed to combat crime in Arab communities, focusing on the main drivers of crime, improving case clearance rates and strengthening cooperation among the various authorities, which was not continued under far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. In Segalovitz’s only full year in government, the number of Arab citizens killed in crimes fell from 126 to 116, according to data from the Abraham Initiatives, a nonprofit that tracks violence and crime in Arab communities. The figure surged to 244 the following year, after he was replaced.
“Segalovitz was the point person in the previous government on crime in the Arab community,” said Perry, the political commentator. “He worked on it, and he delivered results. That made him a very popular figure on the Arab street. Not because he was pro-Palestinian, not because he was against the IDF, but because he reduced crime among Arab citizens.”
Former Yesh Atid MK Inbar Bezek, who served alongside Segalovitz in both the party and the coalition that relied on Ra’am, told JTA: “I saw with my own eyes that Yoav is an extremely respected and well-liked figure throughout Arab society, especially among local government leaders.”
Segalovitz’s possible move is far more than symbolic.
Bezek believes Segalovitz could both increase Arab voter turnout and attract Jewish left-wing voters to Ra’am. “I truly think he’s someone who brings voters to the ballot box,” she said. But she emphasized that the addition of Jewish voters would not change the overall balance between the opposing blocs, because those voters would otherwise support the Democrats, the most left-wing Zionist party.
That assessment appears to be supported by a recent Channel 13 poll, which was conducted in part by Makladeh. The survey found that Ra’am would rise to seven seats if Segalovitz joined the party, compared with five seats in most recent polls. Makladeh said six of those seats would come from Arab voters, while one would come from Jewish voters.
The move’s real significance, argued Perry, lies not in winning additional votes before Election Day but in what happens afterward. He says that bringing Segalovitz into the party is intended “to create renewed legitimacy for Ra’am’s participation in a governing coalition.”
“I don’t think this would dramatically reshape the electoral map,” Perry said. “But it could dramatically reshape the question of legitimacy. It could complete Mansour Abbas’ metamorphosis from the leader of a non-Zionist Islamist party into the leader of a Jewish-Arab party that puts the integration of Israel’s Arab citizens first, while setting aside issues related to the Palestinian national struggle.”
Perry’s comments come as leaders of the opposition bloc send mixed and sometimes contradictory signals about whether they would govern with Ra’am.
Eisenkot has said he “doesn’t rule out” a coalition partnership with Abbas. Another strong contender for the premiership, Bennett, whose Together (Beyachad) party is polling second within the opposing bloc, said in February that “after October 7, there is no mandate in Israel for a government that relies on Arab parties.” Bennett recently declined to answer directly when asked whether he would rely on Abbas to form a government. Speculation is high, however, that he would agree to sit with Ra’am, given his past record of including the party in the coalition after running a campaign in which he promised not to do so.
Opposition Leader Lapid joined forces in this election cycle with Bennett after his own party struggled in the polls and the two now run together on the same slate. Lapid has also ruled out forming a government that relies on Arab parties — a notable position given that Lapid was the architect of the move to bring Ra’am into the coalition in 2021. Another opposition leader, Avigdor Liberman who heads Yisrael Beiteinu, sat with Ra’am in the 2021-2022 government. Last week, however, he said that “Ra’am cannot be a coalition partner.”
Segalovitz’s membership in Ra’am could soften that resistance.
“It will be very difficult to delegitimize a party whose number two is a Zionist and a former Israel Police major general,” Makladeh said. He believes that Segalovitz’s addition could effectively “legitimize” Ra’am’s votes in the eyes of the Israeli public, making it easier for opposition leaders to cooperate with the party after the election.
The hesitation among opposition leaders also reflects Netanyahu’s campaign strategy, which identifies the bloc’s dependence on Arab support as its main political vulnerability.
In a video posted this month on X, Netanyahu juxtaposed his political rivals with Abbas under the slogan, “It’s them or us.”
Segalovitz’s potential move has also drawn backlash from the right. Ben-Gvir called Segalovitz’s departure from Yesh Atid “a joint conspiracy by the left to pave the way for a future government with the Muslim Brotherhood.” Coalition lawmaker Tally Gotliv of the Likud called Segalovitz Abbas’ “pet Jew” and warned that his move could lead to “the imposition of Sharia law on Israel.”
Perry said, “Almost the only political asset Netanyahu has left to take into the election is negative campaigning, because it’s very difficult to build a positive campaign around the last term.” He argued that Netanyahu has relatively few lines of attack against Eisenkot beyond the possibility that he could form a government with Arab parties. “That’s basically the Likud’s one-trick pony in 2026,” Perry added. “And it’s a message that has political effectiveness.”
This is why the addition of Segalovitz who comes from the Israeli center and not the far left is significant, Perry explained. The political commentator added: “If Ra’am enters the realm of legitimacy — because it is no longer Ra’am, it is no longer Islamist, and it is no longer only Abbas but Abbas and Segalovitz — then that could create a more realistic possibility of removing Netanyahu after the election.”
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Man charged in Central Synagogue attack linked to posts about Israel, Judaism, and Mamdani
The man accused of attacking a woman and a security guard at Central Synagogue, a prominent New York City congregation on Manhattan’s Upper East Side during Friday night services, had filled his Facebook page with posts about Israel and Judaism in the months leading up to the attack — and, according to his aunt, had expressed a desire to convert to the Jewish faith.
“He’s mentally traumatized because of his desire to belong to that religion [Judaism] — that’s what he’s said,” Myriam Montes, the aunt of Larry Montes, 46, told the New York Post.
“Given what happened, he might not have been in his right mind,” she said. However, she added that she had not spoken with her nephew in three months.
On a Facebook page that appears to belong to Montes, he reposted a video comparing New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
Other videos reposted on the page focused on Jewish and Israeli topics. One featured a Jewish man disputing claims that the Talmud contains disparaging remarks about Jesus. In 2024, he posted a photo of the map of Israel with text overlaid that says, “Keep Israel in your heart.” Another reposted video featured Rabbi Yosef Mizrachi explaining why evangelical Christians support Israel.
The page also reposted several videos from Ruhama’s Food, a popular Israeli social media account.
The Facebook page’s recent posts are more disjointed. They include screenshots showing attempts to translate seemingly incoherent Spanish text into Hebrew.
Police said Montes had three prior arrests before the Central Synagogue attack, all of which were for robbery.
Montes was charged with two counts of assault as a hate crime and one count of criminal mischief as a hate crime. He is expected to appear in court on August 20.
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