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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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His family was forced to sell their precious Pissarro painting before fleeing Nazi Germany; will he finally see justice?
It has been more than four years since I first reported on the looted art case regarding the Camille Pissarro painting, “Rue Saint-Honoré, Apres Midi, Effet de Pluie,” in The Forward. The painting is part of a series the Jewish artist painted from the safety of his hotel room in Paris at the height of the Dreyfus Affair in France.
The scandal, sparked by the false conviction of a Jewish army office tore French society apart and brought to light the country’s deep antisemitism. “Rue Saint-Honoré” is both an important work of Impressionism and a testament to historical events. If recovered, it may even break records at auction, how rare a Pissarro cityscape comes on the market, and how robust the fine art auction industry is at present. “The painting could “easily break the hundred-million-dollar mark at auction, following its recovery,” says historian and looted art expert, Jonathan Petropoulos.
The case of this rediscovered Pissarro painting captured my imagination from an aesthetic, legal, and storytelling perspective. It is a saga that has it all — art, war, robber barons, and more — and forces everyone who encounters it to reckon with fundamental questions on morality and humanity — from both a personal and historical perspective.
The case has been in the public consciousness for far longer than my own connection to it, however. In 1939, just prior to the onset of World War II, Lilly Cassirer — who inherited Rue St. Honoré through her husband, a member of a renowned family of cultural patrons in Germany — was forced to sell the painting under duress in order to flee Nazi Germany.
Sixty years later, in December of 1999, Lilly’s heirs discovered that the Pissarro had not been lost or destroyed in the war. In fact, it had resurfaced at the new Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid, a collection belonging to the Kingdom of Spain acquired directly from the Thyssen Steel family, which had financed Hitler’s early rise to power.
The rediscovery kicked off an Odyssean legal journey up and down the federal courts in California, all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington twice, and back. Now, another ruling is expected from the Federal District Court in Los Angeles this spring, on remand from the U.S. Supreme Court. The Supreme Court has asked the district court to issue a new ruling in light of a new California law regarding stolen and Holocaust-looted art. For its part, the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum maintains that it is the legitimate owner of the painting and that “there were no indications of bad faith in the acquisition of the painting.”
A separate, concurrent effort is underway in Congress to update the Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act of 2016 (HEAR Act), a Federal law that enabled Nazi-looted art claims to be submitted within six years of discovery of a work of art, thereby supplanting any state statute of limitations. The law was intended to expire after ten years, but given the enormous amount of looted art still to be found, the proposed update would remove the sunset clause, as well as dismiss defenses not directly related to the merits of the cases. The new act specifically cites this Pissarro painting and the legal case to recover it, seeking to prevent other looted art claims from facing a similar, protracted legal battle. The bill already passed the Senate Judiciary Committee in a unanimous vote and is on the docket for a vote in the House of Representatives.
On the eve of two significant moments in the adjudication of Nazi-looted art, I sat down with David Cassirer, Lilly’s last living heir, and Sam Dubbin, one of his lawyers working on the case.
David, not long from now, there will be a new court decision on the long running case to restitute your family’s Pissarro painting “Rue Saint-Honoré, Apres Midi, Effet de Pluie,” which was a prized possession of your great-grandmother Lilly. What are you feeling at the moment?
David Cassirer: I’m pretty excited. It’s been such a long time since we started. This case gets exciting, and then it slows down. This is one of those exciting moments. There’s a lot going on, and we’re feeling pretty confident that we’re close to a recovery, after finding the painting more than twenty-six years ago
And what about you, Sam, how are you feeling?
Sam Dubbin: That’s a great question, because in my profession, you get optimistic, and then you get deflated, and sometimes the deflation takes a long time to get over. But deep down, I’m feeling optimistic, like this could really happen. And the moments when I feel lucky that it’s happening, I say to myself, “That’s ridiculous. It’s so long overdue.” What should have been done, should have been done so long ago. If the Thyssen-Bornemisza museum had given it back when Claude asked for it in 2000, he would have had ten years to enjoy it, to show it to people, to donate it. And it would have been a magnificent event.
This painting is important within the oeuvre of Pissarro’s work, but also historically in connection with the Dreyfus affair. Can you elaborate on its cultural and historical importance?
Dubbin: Pissarro painted this painting from the second floor of the Grand Hôtel du Louvre during the height of the Dreyfus Affair, when he literally feared for his life. He could not be seen on the streets of Paris because the antisemitism was so intense, and it’s considered one of the great works of the Impressionist movement. And so when you think about its origin during the Dreyfus Affair, then being looted by the Nazis during the preeminent human rights war crime in history, and now not being returned by the Kingdom of Spain, it’s just such an egregious, arrogant violation of decency and humanity.
And for you David, from a personal standpoint, what does the painting mean to you?
Cassirer: One of the things I like about the case is that there has been so much extraordinary publicity and interest by the public and by the press that it kind of reconnected the dots between the Impressionists and my family. My father would be very proud to read about the fact that his cousins Paul and Bruno, had championed the Impressionists and responsible for some of their success. There’s a new exhibition that’s starting soon in Berlin all about Paul Cassirer. It’s exciting to see this. It’s exciting in light of all the antisemitism that we’ve seen and the resurgence of it lately, to have some good news about Jewish contributions to culture, not to mention that Pissarro himself was Jewish. I’m delighted when I read stuff that starts to put in perspective this whole concept of our role in culture. It’s not the only thing Jewish people do, but it’s a big part of our culture.
I’d be very happy on behalf of the family and our friends to win the case, but it’s equally important that the case stands for something. And my father would feel that in his bones, especially since he really was there in the Holocaust and watched his family wiped out, watched their fortunes wiped out, watched most of his relatives sent off to the camps and so on. So, he felt it on a level I can only empathize with. It’s different if you’re there at a detention camp in the desert outside of Casablanca, and you’re dying of typhoid fever because there’s no running water and there’s no toilets. So luckily, he was young and strong and came back and survived and got here during the war. And of course, he went in to try to enlist. [The Americans] threw him out. “We’re not taking any Germans. Are you crazy?” He was very disappointed that he couldn’t join up and fight the Nazis.
The U.S. Supreme Court held in 2022 that California law should apply in this case, which was a big victory. But then the appellate court ruled against you, once again. What’s at stake with the next court decision?
Cassirer: I badly need this case to come out right, not just for the family. It’s a very important precedent. My father would have wanted people to be able to cite, to point to Cassirer v. Spain, Cassirer v. Thyssen-Bornemisza. That’s a big deal. We want people to be able to rely on that precedent all over the country and maybe in other countries as well, so I’m watching for that. It isn’t just California law versus Spain, it’s American law versus Spain. Generally speaking, throughout the country, the rule would be that you never acquire good title to stolen stuff. That’s the bigger picture here. The Supreme Court ruling meant that we are going to use good old American law to decide this thing ultimately.
Dubbin: By the way, Spanish law is an outlier. Even in other European countries, you cannot acquire good title even after the passage of time, if you take it in bad faith. Even countries like Germany, France, Netherlands, and Switzerland. Only Spain allows you to get good title after six years of adverse possession if you acquired something in bad faith.
It feels like a case in which, hopefully, common sense and morality can align. I think oftentimes, when the public thinks about the law, there’s sometimes a frustration that can arise, because cases are not always litigated based on what the public thinks is the logical, morally correct outcome. But hopefully, from what you’re saying, this could be one of those cases. David, what have been some of the positive things that have come out of this battle?
Cassirer: Lots of great stuff although it’s been difficult to wait so long and to watch my immediate family pass away in the interim. And as you can see, I’m not getting any younger here. (David is 71). It’s been a long, hard slog. The support from non-Jews has been extraordinary. We would expect, and we did receive, endless support from Jewish organizations and Jewish individuals. It’s been amazing, however, how much support we’ve had from day one in the press and in the public and in government, et cetera. I’ve been very heartened by the fact that we’ve had so much support from people “without a dog in the race,” so to speak, beyond the Jewish community.
I’ve also been very heartened in recent years with Sam’s extraordinary success working with legislatures, both in California and in Washington, and that the support isn’t just from one side or the other. It’s amazingly bipartisan. People who don’t even talk to each other gladly work together on these bills, sponsor these bills, and fend off anyone trying to undo it. Even though we haven’t won yet, we have won many battles along the way.
David, what advice would you give to other families who may be pursuing cases? What do you hope people take away from your experience?
Cassirer: That’s a good question. Assuming that we’re ultimately successful, which I’m still pretty confident with Sam’s help and this extraordinary team that we’ve managed to assemble, that we are going to win this thing. People should be encouraged, in a meta sense, that it’s worth fighting for stuff that’s important, even if the odds are long, even if other people might not be successful at it. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try and you shouldn’t stick with it. I’ve been in the case twenty-six years and counting. If you’re tough enough and dedicated enough and you figure out a way to surround yourself with talented, committed people, there’s very little that can’t be accomplished in this country and in other countries as well. I think for me, that’s a pretty big takeaway.
You’ve just struck me that you’re talking about the American dream.
Cassirer: Yes! My father told me that the greatest day he ever had was becoming an American citizen. After what he had been through and being stateless, having had his government turn against him, it’s interesting that, given his extraordinary life, the greatest day of his life to him was when he became a naturalized citizen; because, to him, that was the American dream.
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Amid antisemitic attacks, Trump has forced an impossible choice on American synagogues
The Thursday attack on Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan, did not occur in a vacuum.
In the past few months, shots were fired at three congregations in Toronto; an explosion rocked a synagogue in Belgium; and an arsonist caused massive damage to Beth Israel Congregation in Mississippi. Antisemitic incidents in the United States have reached historic highs. The threat is real, it is escalating, and American Jews know it.
Which is why the federal government’s decision to use this moment in history to force Jewish communities to choose between their own safety and that of immigrants is so unforgivable.
That choice is being created as part of the government’s Nonprofit Security Grant Program, which under President Donald Trump has instituted troubling new changes.
The program was established in 2004 to help houses of worship pay for cameras, barriers, armed guards and alarm systems, then expanded after the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre in 2018. It has perhaps never mattered more than it does right now. It provides, quite literally, life-saving money. The demand for grants vastly outpaces the supply, with thousands of organizations competing for a fraction of the security funds they need.
Now, those funds come with new strings attached.
Beginning in 2025, the Department of Homeland Security attached sweeping ideological conditions to new security grants. Recipients of new awards must cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations, and must also agree not to “operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, DEIA, or discriminatory equity ideology.” They additionally must not run any aid program which “benefits illegal immigrants or incentivizes illegal immigration.”
When asked to clarify what those conditions mean in practice — whether a synagogue that declares itself a sanctuary for refugees would be disqualified, or whether a congregation offering programming for Jews of color or LGBTQ+ Jews would run afoul of the anti-DEI clause — the federal government’s answer has been months of contradictory guidance and confusion.
The terrifying potential consequences of that muddle were thrown into sharp relief by Thursday’s attack.
A man armed with a rifle rammed his truck through the doors of Temple Israel, driving down a hallway before being killed by the synagogue’s security staff. Thankfully, no congregants were hurt, and the children in the preschool run by the synagogue all made it home safely.
Many congregations do not have the independent resources to support security protocols as effective as Temple Israel’s proved to be. Instead, they rely on the government to help bridge the gap.
But under Trump’s second administration, security funding — the money that pays for the tools that may one day save lives — is now a lever to use to force political compliance.
This is of particular significance for Reform Judaism, the largest Jewish denomination in the U.S. and that to which Temple Israel belongs. The movement’s commitment to welcoming the stranger, hachnasat orchim — stemming from the commandment to love the stranger, repeated no fewer than 36 times in the Torah — is core to its identity. It is no coincidence that many Reform congregations have declared themselves sanctuaries for refugees.
And it’s of particular significance because antisemitic violence is often linked to anti-immigrant sentiment. The deadliest act of antisemitic violence in U.S. history, the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, was motivated by hatred toward immigrants, and toward Jewish programs that aid them.
The Trump administration’s demand that liberal American Jews choose between a foundational Jewish value and basic safety from violence is heartbreaking. One anonymous rabbi described the dilemma with devastating clarity to JTA: “Money is being given to us on condition that we violate a specific mitzvah. I don’t see how we can possibly accept that money.”
Rabbi Jill Maderer in Philadelphia put it even more bluntly, saying “Jewish safety requires inclusive democracy and inclusive democracy requires Jewish safety. We do not comply so we will not apply.”
These are communities under armed threat — as Thursday clearly reminded us — forced to choose between their physical safety and their moral integrity. That is a choice that no American religious community should ever have to make. The government’s obligation to protect its citizens, especially its most targeted minorities, must not come with an ideological price tag.
What makes this especially galling is the timing. A government shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security, born out of a political standoff over immigration enforcement, is currently halting the review of security grant applications. Synagogues that applied for funding months ago are waiting for approvals that may not come.
They are waiting, in many cases, to find out whether the security upgrades that might have made the difference under circumstances like those that unfolded in Michigan will be funded or not.
There is a word for demanding that a persecuted minority community abandon its values in exchange for protection: extortion. The Trump administration would no doubt dispute that framing. After all, the administration claims to care deeply about Jewish safety. Thursday’s attack makes clear that it is not enough for the administration to make that claim; it must prove its commitment through action.
It must remove the political conditions from the Nonprofit Security Grant Program. It must let houses of worship be what they are: sanctuaries, not instruments of federal policy.
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‘For As Long As Necessary’: Katz Says Campaign Against Iran Entering Decisive Stage
Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz and his Greek counterpart Nikos Dendias make statements to the press, at the Ministry of Defense in Athens Greece, Jan. 20, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Louisa Gouliamaki
i24 News – Israel Katz said Saturday that the confrontation with Iran had entered a “decisive phase,” as US and Israeli strikes on Iranian targets continued and regional tensions escalated.
Speaking after a security assessment at Israel’s defense headquarters alongside Eyal Zamir, chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, and senior military and intelligence officials, the Israeli defense minister said the campaign against the Islamic Republic would continue “for as long as necessary.”
“The global and regional struggle against Iran, led by American President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is intensifying and entering its decisive phase,” Katz said.
Katz also praised US strikes on Kharg Island, a key Iranian oil hub, describing them as a “severe blow” to the Iranian regime. He said the attacks were an appropriate response to Iranian threats against the strategic Strait of Hormuz and to what he called Tehran’s attempts to pressure the international community.
At the same time, Katz said the Israeli Air Force was continuing a “powerful wave of attacks” against targets in Tehran and other parts of Iran.
He accused the Iranian leadership of using “regional and global terrorism” and strategic blackmail in an effort to deter Israel and the United States from pursuing their military campaign, warning that such actions would be met with a “strong and uncompromising response.”
Katz added that the outcome of the conflict would ultimately depend on the Iranian population. “Only the Iranian people can put an end to this situation through a determined struggle, until the overthrow of the terrorist regime and the salvation of Iran,” he said.
According to the minister, the confrontation now pits the Iranian regime’s determination to survive against growing military pressure from Israel and its allies.