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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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Far-right Israel critic James Fishback likens abortion to the Holocaust
(JTA) — James Fishback, a fierce critic of Israel and a far-right politician, offered scathing remarks about the Jewish state and likened abortion to the Holocaust during an address at the University of Mississippi on Tuesday evening.
Fishback, a former GOP gubernatorial candidate in Florida, recalled that earlier this summer the Combat Antisemitism Movement flagged as antisemitic one of his X posts describing abortion as a holocaust.
“Abortion is a holocaust, and by every single historical metric available, it was worse than the other one,” Fishback said, claiming that “61 million children have been killed in the womb since Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided in 1973.”
He also had harsh words for the state of Israel. “It is time for President Trump to call [Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu and cut him off. We must decouple from Israel to save America,” he added.
Fishback was speaking at a Turn Up the Mic forum arranged by members of the University of Mississippi chapter of Turning Point USA, the organization founded by the late Charlie Kirk.
Slamming immigration policies on both sides of the aisle — Republicans for too few mass deportations and Democrats for an influx of foreign workers — Fishback declared, “It’s time to stand up and tell both parties that no, American jobs are for Americans only.”
He noted, however, that making such demands could result in a person being labeled a racist or misogynist, and that “if you’re really bad they’ll call you an antisemite.” Stressing that he condemns “all forms of religious hatred,” he maintained that “the most virulent” type is the hostility “against Christians in this country.”
Fishback blamed Israel and the inability of the U.S. to “tell them no” for drawing the country into the war with Iran. That war, he argued, has pushed gas prices and Treasury yields higher.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Far-right Israel critic James Fishback likens abortion to the Holocaust appeared first on The Forward.
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Protesters stormed Mahmoud Khalil’s book release. His Israeli editor confronted them.
Minutes before activist Mahmoud Khalil was scheduled to speak Tuesday night about his new memoir at a bookstore near the Columbia University campus where he led pro-Palestinian demonstrations, protesters stormed inside with a megaphone, a sign and a large American–Israeli flag.
“Zionist Jews are here,” announced Ross Glick over the megaphone, as he entered Book Culture. “We are against intifada.”
Glick is the former CEO of Betar US, a pro-Israel organization labeled an “extremist group” by the Anti-Defamation League for its harassment tactics. Betar previously shared names of pro-Palestinian protesters, including Khalil, with federal immigration authorities. Khalil is suing Betar along with the Heritage Foundation and the Canary Mission. Betar reached a settlement with New York state over harassment allegations and wound down its operations.
Khalil was upstairs, along with most of the book event’s attendees, when the demonstrators entered the store downstairs. Employees ushered the protesters outside, but one came back inside minutes later waving the flag and singing “Am Yisrael Chai.”
A store employee tried to grab the flag from the protester. After a brief tug-of-war, the protester appeared to hit the employee’s arm as he pulled the flag from her.
Khalil’s editor Riva Hocherman, who is Israeli, confronted the protesters in Hebrew.
“I really wanted to get a sense of whether they knew Hebrew, and they didn’t,” Hocherman told the Forward. “They just enrage me.”
Hocherman specializes in publishing books on the Middle East and previously worked with Rashid Khalidi as his editor on The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. She said she was motivated to work with Khalid because, “His story was one that was really worth telling, and a great injustice was perpetrated.”
Khalil’s memoir, No Land to Stand on, focuses on his 2025 detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Khalil was held for more than 100 days and became the face of the debate over free speech on campus and when anti-Zionism crosses the line into antisemitism.
In his book, Khalil, who was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, says that pro-Palestinian protesters were peaceful, while “it was the pro-Israel students and Zionist groups that had provoked confrontations, harassed Palestinian students, and in some cases physically attacked them.”
Khalid mentions Hocherman in the acknowledgments section of his book: “Riva, my editor, is not only a champion of the book but of the cause.”
Hocherman addressed the protesters because she said they lie about Khalil, and because she wanted to show that not all Jews and Israelis think the same.
“Our opinion is not a monolith,” she said. “There is a range of opinion among Israelis and Jews. We don’t all think like they do.”
The event, only slightly delayed, carried on without further interruptions. Khalil spoke with environmental lawyer and activist Steven Donziger and answered a few questions from attendees before signing books. He received a standing ovation from the crowd of more than 85 people.
The post Protesters stormed Mahmoud Khalil’s book release. His Israeli editor confronted them. appeared first on The Forward.
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If Trump makes good on offering Canadian Jews refugee status, will they come?
(JTA) — TORONTO –- Sari Watson was too afraid to attend Yom Kippur services. Concerned by rising levels of antisemitism in Canada, she was safely at home 25 minutes away when a gunman charged at her childhood synagogue.
“My internal alarm has been going off, and you begin to think about escape routes or backup plans,” said Watson, 39, who lives in Quinte West, Ontario, about 15 miles west of Belleville, where the attack during Kol Nidre on Sept. 20 culminated in a shootout that left the gunman dead and one policeman hospitalized. “The only reason I wasn’t at synagogue was because I have been terrified of this exact situation, or worse, happening.”
Florida Sen. Rick Scott, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt and President Donald Trump himself, all Republicans, have proposed extending refugee status to Canadian Jews who fear the spike in antisemitism in their country.
“’It’s so amazing to know that the Republicans understand the level of antisemitism we’re dealing with here,” she says. “President Trump gets the climate and the danger.”
Still, Watson has mixed emotions about the thought of leaving her home country. “I want to stay here and fight for our safety in Canada,” she said. “The option to come to the U.S. is really important, but we shouldn’t have to need it.”
The Trump administration has imposed stringent restrictions on immigration and is carrying out mass deportations, but is inviting South African whites – and now, potentially, Canadian Jews – refugee status. Critics accuse Trump of playing politics with refugee status, but some Canadian Jews see it as a lifeline.
Talk of Jews feeling compelled to leave Canada gained momentum last week when a well-known Jewish journalist posted publicly on social media about getting a foreign passport. Neil Herland, a newsreader for the national broadcaster, the CBC, wrote on X about his encounter with pro-Palestinian protesters outside Toronto’s Meridian Arts Centre, where Yom Kippur services were being held. Herland said that, concerned about rising antisemitism in Canada, he recently acquired his Austrian passport as a safety precaution. (Independent Press Gallery, a press freedom advocacy group, condemned the CBCfor reportedly suspending Herland after pro-Palestinian advocates lodged a complaint about his post.)
Some Jews are past the precaution stage. Sheldon Shugal, 64, and his wife are currently researching how to move to the United States.
“If I were able to claim refugee status to come to the U.S., I’d do it without hesitation,” said Shugal, who lives in Calgary. “I used to love our country … but it’s just not a place that I want to continue to live in.”
Shugal, a property manager, said he has seen increased antisemitism in Canada in the wake of the deadly Hamas raid in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the war it launched. He said he and his wife have been struggling to overcome the complexity of acquiring an American visa.
“The Jew-hatred is no longer rising in Canada, it’s fully immersed here,” says Shugal. “It’s not the country I grew up in. I don’t feel affinity to Canada anymore.”
Shugal’s concerns are reflected in the findings of B’nai Brith Canada, which recently reported a 9.3% increase in antisemitic incidents from 2024-2025. According to this report, online harassment has surged dramatically, while Ontario saw the greatest total number of antisemitic incidents out of all the Canadian provinces and territories.
Antisemitic attacks have proliferated. In March of this year, Toronto synagogue Temple Emanu-El was shot at following Purim celebrations. The next week, two more Toronto synagogues were hit with gunfire over Shabbat, causing damage to the buildings, though no injuries were reported. In late April, assailants allegedly fired replica guns at “visually-identifiable” members of the city’s Jewish community, with one of the men sustaining minor injuries.
Shugal said reports of antisemitism have rattled him as well as the pro-Palestinian encampment his daughter encountered on her campus. “There hasn’t necessarily been anything I’ve personally experienced. It’s just what I’ve seen throughout the country,” Shugal said.
Lauren Cohen, an immigration lawyer based in Boca Raton, Florida, said that since the Oct. 7 attacks, about half of her Canadian clients cite antisemitism as a primary reason for wanting to leave Canada for the United States.
“In the past three months, I’ve noticed a very significant increase in the number of people between 55-70 who are contacting me,” said Cohen, who is originally from Toronto. “They have grown children or no children, and they have a little bit more money,” she said. “They want freedom.”
Antisemitism is not the only consideration for her clients, Cohen said. “The economy’s struggling. It’s not just antisemitism,” she said. “That might be the straw that broke the camel’s back, but it’s so many other factors as well.”
Cohen founded the Jewish Community Collective, an organization which helps Jewish Canadians and “displaced Jews” find connection in America. Another option for Jewish Canadians looking to make a new home in the States is Lech L’Tulsa, a program cosponsored by the Jewish Federation of Tulsa that helps settle Jewish newcomers, “designed to help Jewish Canadian citizens relocate to Tulsa.”
Some Canadian Jews do not see greener grass south of the 49th parallel, however. They point to Canada’s more expansive social safety net as one of the many reasons life in the Great White North” is better.. “Unquestionably, the answer to whether I’d consider moving to the States is emphatically ‘no,’” said Lawrence Stanleigh, a dentist in Calgary.
“I believe our country is a better place to live,” said Stanleigh, 67. “The U.S. doesn’t have a public healthcare system. Why would I want to leave our safety net for the U.S.?”
Stanleigh said the idea that the United States is a safe haven for Canadian Jews is misleading. “As bad as things are in Canada, I think they’re worse in the United States,” he said. “It’s not a better place for education or for healthcare. The whole idea of moving there for our safety is a fantasy that the Republicans believe in.”
Substituting the United States for Canada is shortsighted, Stanleigh said. “There are failures on behalf of Canadian leaders to stand firm in their support of the Jewish community,” he said. “But as bad as things are, I think they’re worse in the States. Our American cousins are blithely unaware of the problems they have at home.”
Anthony Housafather, a Jewish Canadian Member of Parliament representing a riding, or electoral district, in Montreal, is skeptical of the notion that the United States would offer Jews better protection.
“I think this idea is inspired by some right-wing Jews who have decided that their mission is to attack the Canadian government, and to make it look like somehow, Donald Trump and the Republicans are the savior of the Jewish people,” Housefather said in an interview.
Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney are at a low point in their relationship, with tensions over trade intensifying – and Trump seeks opportunities to take potshots at Carney.
Housefather also does not believe that leaving for the United States is gaining traction among Canadian Jews. “There are some people who have decided that Florida or Israel is a greener pasture,” he said. “But that does not represent a significant or a predominant view, and the idea that everybody’s leaving Canada is actually not true.”
The increase in antisemitism is universal – and should be treated holistically, he said. “What I do agree with is everywhere there’s a very serious problem with antisemitism,” he said. “Everywhere Jewish communities don’t feel safe, and all levels of government need to keep doing more.”
Housefather encourages his Jewish countrymen to remain proud Canadians. “Antisemitism has grown to an unacceptable level in this country,” he said. “It doesn’t mean that you should have less pride in being Canadian because there’s a loud, angry, small group of Canadians trying to make us scared.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post If Trump makes good on offering Canadian Jews refugee status, will they come? appeared first on The Forward.
