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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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Sunkist Fruit Gems return after panic over loss of synagogue staple
(JTA) — Sunkist Fruit Gems, candies beloved for their throwable qualities at Jewish celebrations, will return after a brief panic over their discontinuation.
The sugar-coated gummies will be on shelves in early 2027 following an outpouring of “overwhelming support and enthusiasm shown by Sunkist Fruit Gems fans in recent days,” Sunkist confirmed to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
The company said it will collaborate with CandyRific, a Kentucky-based confectionery company, to continue the legacy of Sunkist Fruit Gems days after reports of the gummies’ demise.
The fruit gems tick crucial boxes for being hurled at bar and bat mitzvahs, wedding celebrations and other happy occasions: They are kosher, soft enough to avoid injuring celebrants and individually wrapped so they don’t get stuck on the floor.
Those attributes will be preserved in their relaunch. “Consumers can expect the same key product characteristics they know and love, including individually wrapped pieces, a soft texture, fruit flavors, and kosher certification,” Sunkist said.
EJewishPhilanthropy first reported Thursday that the fruit gems were being discontinued by Ferrara, a Chicago-based candy company, prompting memorial tributes in Jewish communities throughout the United States.
The fruit gems have been a staple at synagogues for generations. They were born from an overabundance of citrus in the 1930s, when the citrus harvester Sunkist transformed its surplus fruit into byproducts, according to a history published by the company. The candies evolved from Christopher’s Fruit Gems to take the Sunkist name in the 1960s.
Protests against their disappearance included an appeal in eJewishPhilanthropy penned by Sara Fredman Aeder, the executive vice president of programming at the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, headlined “Save the Fruit Gems.”
Sunkist’s announcement on Instagram that the fruit gems were “not going anywhere” was met with grateful replies.
“I panic-bought in bulk for my wedding next year,” said one commenter on Instagram. “Now I feel foolish lol. But enjoying a bunch of very yummy gummies.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Sunkist Fruit Gems return after panic over loss of synagogue staple appeared first on The Forward.
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Mamdani rolls out NYC’s first plan for fighting antisemitism — without defining the term
Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Tuesday unveiled New York City’s first comprehensive strategy to combat antisemitism, promising millions of dollars for security, hate-crime prevention and Jewish education as antisemitic incidents rise.
But the 30-page plan leaves unresolved a central source of tension between Mamdani and much of the Jewish community: what counts as antisemitism and when anti-Zionism crosses that line. That question has followed Mamdani since his first day as mayor, when he revoked an executive order from former Mayor Eric Adams adopting the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism. The IHRA definition considers most forms of anti-Zionism as antisemitic.
The strategy does not adopt a formal definition of antisemitism and offers little clarity on how the administration views anti-Zionism.
“New York City can and will leverage all of the tools at its disposal to combat antisemitism effectively without needing to adopt a definition for this specific form of hate,” the document reads.
Phylisa Wisdom, who leads the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism and crafted the plan, told reporters the city is taking an approach similar to the Biden administration’s 2023 national antisemitism strategy, which drew from several competing definitions and frameworks rather than choosing one. Those include IHRA; the Nexus Document, which says criticism of Israel or opposition to Israeli government policy is not necessarily antisemitic; and the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, which offers a narrower definition.
Wisdom said the administration’s focus is less on settling that debate than on protecting Jewish New Yorkers regardless of their politics.
The Israel question
The question of how to define antisemitism has shaped the debate over pro-Palestinian protests at college campuses and outside synagogues, a persistent source of tension between Mamdani and Jewish organizations.
The strategy mentions the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel and the war that followed as part of the rise in antisemitism, but does not directly link them. It points to a broader rise that began years earlier, including around the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville and the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh. Wisdom said antisemitism often spikes during conflicts involving Israel, as NYPD data showed after Oct. 7.
Mamdani has long sought to distinguish between his opposition to Israel and Zionism and his commitment to protecting Jewish New Yorkers. But he has repeatedly clashed with Jewish organizations and leaders over where anti-Zionist activism crosses the line into antisemitism. Those tensions intensified after a series of protests outside synagogues hosting events promoting real estate in Israel and the West Bank and his repeated accusations that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Some demonstrations have included chants calling for an “intifada” and other rhetoric Jewish leaders described as antisemitic and intimidating. Mamdani has condemned violence and expressions of support for terrorist organizations, but also defended the constitutional right to protest.
That prompted City Council Speaker Julie Menin to push legislation this past spring requiring the NYPD to develop a plan for establishing a buffer zone when demonstrations involve harassment, intimidation or physical threats. Mamdani, who had raised concerns about restricting protests, allowed the synagogue measure to become law without his signature.
The new antisemitism plan notes that neither the NYPD nor FBI considers protest outside a house of worship hateful or antisemitic, a position the Mamdani administration shares.
Menin told the Forward she had no input in developing the strategy. Wisdom said her office met with the City Council’s Jewish Caucus, of which Menin is a member. A spokesperson for Menin said the speaker was briefed Monday, a day before the plan was released.
What the plan includes: Security and prevention
The strategy comes as antisemitic incidents continue to move in the wrong direction. Recent NYPD statistics showed that in the first seven months of 2026, anti-Jewish incidents rose 8.5%, and 57% of the reported hate crimes in the city involved Jewish victims.
The new strategy attempts to tackle that problem through funding for security, education and cultural programs.
The Mamdani administration is putting $6.4 million into the Partners Against the Hate grant program that offers grants up to $10,000 for community-based initiatives. It is part of a $26 million investment Mamdani announced earlier this year for the Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes. The Jewish Community Relations Council of New York will serve as the anchor organization in the program, working with grassroots groups on programs that include education, victim support, data collection and combating online hate.
Another $1 million will go toward a security program aimed particularly at smaller religious institutions and vulnerable nonprofits that may not qualify for larger federal security grants. The money could pay for stronger door locks, shatter-resistant glass and security wands.
And the administration is restarting an interagency Security Infrastructure Working Group that brings together the NYPD, Department of Transportation and other city agencies to help synagogues and Jewish cultural institutions assess threats and improve security.
City Hall also plans to work with public schools to expand eighth-grade visits to the Museum of Jewish Heritage and continue teaching students about Jewish American history through existing curriculum. The administration is also investing $2 million to complete the Queens Holocaust Memorial and $2.5 million in the Center for New Jewish Culture in Brooklyn.
An informational campaign on LinkNYC kiosks across the five boroughs will highlight the contributions of Jewish New Yorkers, modeled after a campaign created to combat anti-Asian hate following the COVID-19 pandemic.
Outreach to Jewish New Yorkers
The plan comes after months of outreach aimed at hearing from a Jewish community deeply divided over Mamdani and his views on Israel.
Wisdom said the office, which includes another two staffers, conducted a five-borough listening tour in homes, schools and community centers. Participants represented a wide range of religious observance and political views.
Mamdani has also increased his own outreach. In August, he met with a group of rabbis from several denominations for a discussion about Jewish safety and belonging. Some of those rabbis pressed him over his rhetoric on Israel. He has also met with Hasidic and Orthodox leaders and maintains close relationships with progressive Jewish organizations.
Wisdom said that concerns raised during those private conversations helped shape the final strategy.
But she acknowledged that those meetings have not erased the central disagreement.
Mamdani has repeatedly accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, produced a Nakba Day video commemorating the displacement of Palestinians during Israel’s founding in 1948, and called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a war criminal.
During his mayoral campaign, he pledged to have Netanyahu arrested if he came to New York under an International Criminal Court warrant, though his administration later acknowledged that the city does not have the authority to carry out such an arrest. Netanyahu, during his speech at the United Nations last week, accused Mamdani of spreading lies about Israel and contributing to an atmosphere in which Jews feel unsafe. Mamdani rejected that criticism and stood by his views on Gaza.
Wisdom said in a press briefing on Monday the administration recognizes that discussions over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are part of the broader conversation about how Jewish New Yorkers experience safety in the city. But she said disagreement with the mayor on foreign policy should have no bearing on whether someone receives the protection of City Hall.
The administration rolled out the strategy on Tuesday with support from top city officials, several Jewish elected officials and liberal and progressive Jewish organizations, including the New York Jewish Agenda, Jewish Council for Public Affairs, Nexus Project, New Jewish Narrative, Jews For Racial & Economic Justice, Bend the Arc and J Street’s New York City chapter.
Jamie Beran, CEO of Bend the Arc, commended the decision not to enshrine a single definition, adding that doing so would be “unnecessary” and “a distraction from substantive policies.”
But the strategy did not meet the demands of the Anti-Defamation League, which had called for a “clear, formal definition of antisemitism the city actually uses.” ADL also asked that the plan ensure city contracts, pensions and procurements are kept “free of ideological boycotts.”
In a video announcing the strategy, the mayor said his conversations with Jewish New Yorkers over the past year repeatedly brought him back to the same concern of growing antisemitism. “This is not only unacceptable,” Mamdani said. “Today, we hold a responsibility to sustain and protect our Jewish neighbors.”
The post Mamdani rolls out NYC’s first plan for fighting antisemitism — without defining the term appeared first on The Forward.
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Evan Gershkovich’s prison memoir begins with a Soviet Jewish exodus
A few days after Russian security agents arrested Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich on a trip in March 2023, his lawyers showed him a slip of paper with messages from home. He was being held alone, in what Russian prisons call “quarantine:” two weeks without a cellmate before joining the general population. His eyes went straight to the note from his mother.
Soon he would start getting kosher food, Ella Milman wrote, and then added: “If you come home with sidelocks, I’ll understand.”
It was a joke, and a very Jewish one. Gershkovich grew up in a secular family of Soviet émigrés, where being Jewish had more to do with family history and dark humor than with religious practice. His mother was ribbing him that a few weeks of kosher prison food might send him home looking like a yeshiva boy.
Sitting across from the investigator building his espionage case, Gershkovich grinned. His mother, he realized, still had her sense of humor, and that was exactly what he needed.
The kosher food wasn’t a joke. That night, with Passover days away, a local rabbi sent him stacks of matzo.
The scene appears in This Cursed Beautiful Land: A Russian-American Story, Gershkovich’s memoir of his arrest, his 16 months behind bars and his release in the most elaborate U.S.-Russia prisoner swap since the Cold War. The book was published Tuesday.
Most of the coverage is about the prison. But Jewish history runs through the book from its first pages. Gershkovich’s great-grandfather was arrested during Stalin’s purges and vanished. His mother was laughed out of a journalism school application once the clerk saw her passport. And when he moved to Moscow as a young reporter, a Russian coworker needled him with an old stereotype about Jews and money.
The family that left
Gershkovich was born in New Jersey in 1991, two months before the Soviet Union fell apart. His parents had come over in 1979. Thousands of Soviet Jews were leaving at the time, helped by a U.S. law that linked trade with Moscow to whether its citizens were allowed to emigrate.
His mother flew out of Leningrad with her mother and ended up in Detroit. His father’s family came from Odessa and settled in Brighton Beach, the Brooklyn neighborhood people call Little Odessa. In those years, his father later joked, Soviet Jews who ran into each other on the street skipped the hellos and just asked where the other was going.
For his father’s side, the decision was easy. Gershkovich’s great-grandfather was arrested in 1937, at the height of Stalin’s purges, and never seen again. His grandfather Mark spent years moving from city to city, afraid of being targeted next, and later dreaded the day his own son would be drafted into the Soviet army.
A Jew on paper
Gershkovich’s mother, Ella, was born in 1957, a few years after the “doctors’ plot,” a Stalin-era campaign that accused Jewish physicians of conspiring to kill Soviet leaders. One of the doctors caught up in it had been a neighbor in her family’s communal apartment.
Her father had wanted to name her Etya, after his late sister. Worried that an obviously Jewish name would draw attention, her mother pushed for Ella instead. It didn’t matter. The family name Milman gave her away, and Soviet passports listed each citizen’s ethnicity. Hers said “Jew.”
Ella dreamed of becoming a writer. When she applied to the journalism department at Leningrad State University, the woman taking her application glanced at her passport and laughed. She studied shipbuilding instead, listened to the Rolling Stones, and heard rumors that the Kremlin planned to deport Jews to Birobidzhan, a remote Soviet region near the Chinese border that had apparently been set up as a Jewish homeland.
When she finally emigrated to America at 22, she sewed a pair of gold earrings from her late father into her skirt’s waistband to get them past customs. Once the plane took off, she couldn’t stop laughing and crying.
A generation later, her son became the journalist she wasn’t allowed to be, and then a prisoner of the state that had turned her away.
Ella and her husand settled in Princeton, New Jersey, where Gershkovich and his sister spent Saturday mornings with a Russian tutor, and holidays meant trips to the Russian groceries and Uzbek grills of Brighton Beach. Gershkovich came to think of himself as Jewish-Russian-American. Russia’s war in Ukraine later forced him to ask why that label had never included Ukraine, given that his father’s family came from Odessa.
The empty chair
In 2017, Gershkovich moved to Moscow to report for The Moscow Times. On one of his first days, he asked a colleague when staff got paid. She laughed and told him his Odessan roots were showing, a jab about Jews and money that served as his introduction to Russian workplace culture.
On a later trip to Odessa, he visited a Jewish museum that displayed a 1953 Soviet propaganda article from the doctors’ plot era. It claimed that the Joint, the New York-based Jewish relief organization, was a front for American intelligence. Gershkovich recalls thinking that Moscow was getting paranoid again, while hoping things hadn’t gotten that bad. A few years later, Russia accused him of spying for the United States.
Gershkovich’s arrest came a week before Passover. That spring, many American Jews left an empty seat for him at their Seders, and activists later sent him letters for Rosh Hashanah. Both gestures deliberately echoed the movement to free Soviet Jewry, the same campaign that had helped free his parents. Natan Sharansky, the most famous Soviet Jewish dissident, who was himself released in a 1986 prisoner swap, advocated publicly for his release.
In July 2024, two weeks after a Russian court sentenced Gershkovich to 16 years in a maximum-security prison, he was freed in a prisoner exchange in Ankara, Turkey. Jewish groups celebrated, and the Orthodox Union posted the traditional blessing thanking God for freeing captives.
His great-grandfather was taken in 1937 and never came home. Eighty-seven years later, his great-grandson did.
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