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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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Iran Has One-Third of Its Missile Launchers Left, IDF Assesses
Smoke rises following an explosion, amid the US-Israeli conflict with Iran, in Tehran, Iran, March 7, 2026. Picture taken with a mobile phone. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
After less than two weeks of fighting, Iran has lost roughly two‑thirds of its ballistic missile launchers, according to a new Israeli military assessment, as Israeli and US strikes intensify across the country and target Tehran’s strategic missile capabilities.
On Wednesday, Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir said a new battlefield assessment revealed that a sweeping campaign against Iran’s missile infrastructure has destroyed roughly two-thirds of its launchers, leaving only about one-third still operational, Hebrew media reported.
Working with the US military, Israeli officials said sustained airstrikes, coordinated by Israeli military intelligence, crippled Iran’s missile capacity — destroying about one-third of its launchers and damaging another third enough to render them unusable, sharply limiting Tehran’s ability to conduct large-scale operations.
Out of an estimated 500 mobile and stationary ballistic missile launchers previously in Iran’s arsenal, the Islamist regime is now believed to have about 160 operational launchers remaining.
According to IDF data, Iran still possesses roughly 1,500 ballistic missiles of various ranges.
However, Israel estimates that more than 80 percent of Iran’s launching capabilities aimed at Israeli territory have already been destroyed, with officials expecting the figure could rise to as high as 95 percent within days, dramatically reducing the scale of future attacks.
In an interview with Israeli news outlet N12 on Wednesday, US President Donald Trump said the war with Iran could end “soon,” though he declined to provide a specific timetable.
“There’s almost nothing left [to attack Iran]. A little bit here and there … Any time I want it to end, it will end,” Trump said.
During a press conference, Trump also said the United States had inflicted unprecedented damage on Iran’s military and strategic infrastructure.
“We have hit them harder than virtually any country in history has been hit, and we’re not finished yet,” he said.
“We’re leaving certain things that if we take them out, or we could take them out by this afternoon, in fact, within an hour, they literally would never be able to build that country back again,” he continued.
While Trump has publicly suggested that the war has achieved most of its objectives and could end soon, senior Israeli and American officials say there is still no indication of when the conflict might end.
This week, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said the campaign would continue “without any time limit” until Israel achieves all of its war objectives.
“The Iranian leadership that survived is a bunch of cowards who prey on women, children, and the elderly in the streets, specializing in massacres and killing civilians — and they are already threatening to murder and slaughter anyone who protests,” the Israeli official said.
“We will continue to act relentlessly, striking day after day, target after target, to crush the regime and dismantle its strategic goals in Tehran and across Iran,” Katz added. “We will continue these efforts to give the Iranian people the opportunity to rise up and overthrow the regime. Ultimately, that outcome depends on them.”
As the war continues to escalate, US officials said Tuesday that American intelligence detected Iranian preparations to lay naval mines in the Strait of Hormuz, a critical and narrow waterway through which about one-fifth of the world’s oil passes. Sources told Reuters on Wednesday that the Iranians have deployed about a dozen mines so far, although the exact number is unclear.
Trump told N12 that recent US strikes — during which 16 Iranian mine-laying boats were destroyed — disrupted Tehran’s plans to threaten the shipping route.
“The war is going great. We are well ahead of schedule. We have caused more damage than we thought possible, even within the original six-week period,” Trump said.
“They’re paying for 47 years of death and destruction that they caused,” he continued, referring to the time that Iran’s Islamist regime has been in power. “This is retribution. They’re not going to get away with it.”
Iran on Wednesday said the world should be ready for oil at $200 a barrel as its forces hit merchant ships. Oil prices skyrocketed earlier in the week to nearly $120 a barrel before settling back to around $90 due to fears about supply disruption.
Almost two weeks into the war, the Israeli Air Force has intensified strikes across Iran and expanded operations farther south into areas where US forces are also active, signaling a broadening campaign against Iranian targets.
In the latest boost for US forces, Romanian President Nicusor Dan said on Wednesday is country will host American refueling planes, surveillance, and satellite communications gear for Washington’s operations against Tehran. However, he added, the equipment is “defensive” and carries no munitions.
Despite the military gains, Israeli officials acknowledge there is still no certainty that the campaign will lead to the overthrow of Iran’s ruling regime.
While Israeli officials have declared their desire to overthrow the Iranian regime, Trump has sent mixed signals about whether he seeks regime change or would be content with destroying Iran’s military capabilities and apparatus for internal repression.
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New ADL Campus Antisemitism Report Card Shows Some Improvement on Addressing Hostile Climate
Protesters gather at the gates of Columbia University, in support of student protesters who barricaded themselves in Hamilton Hall, in New York City, US, April 30, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/David Dee Delgado
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has released a new annual “Campus Antisemitism Report Card,” in which its researchers assigned grades to major US colleges and universities based on how the institutions responded to the issue in accordance with civil rights laws and their own professed values.
Released on Monday, the report rewarded some elite colleges previously accused of ignoring antisemitism with letter grades considerably above what they earned in past academic years. Most notably, no Ivy League institution merited an “F” this year, while Columbia University, Princeton University, and Yale University all improved on last year’s close to failing “D” grade by earning a “C.”
A “C” grade, a mark again given to Harvard University and Cornell University in this year’s report, indicates lingering areas of inertia in performance. Pomona College, Northwestern University, Swarthmore College, and the University of Chicago were assigned a “C” too, indicating that elite higher education across the country remains a problematic space for Jewish youth.
Meanwhile, four colleges, including Evergreen State College, Scripps College, California State University, Los Angeles, and The New School in New York City received an “F,” the only institutions in the cohort to fail the ADL’s assessment.
“The data confirms what we’ve said from the start: maintaining a safe campus climate is a matter of will,” ADL chief executive officer Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement. “Universities that have taken a comprehensive approach — reviewing policies, clarifying expectations, and strengthening enforcement — are seeing meaningful progress. Some of the strongest gains are coming from institutions that have engaged deeply with our recommendations and translated them into lasting institutional practice, rather than symbolic commitments.”
The 2025-2026 academic year has seen a continuation of the barrage of antisemitic incidents that led Jewish community advocates to describe the issue as a “problem,” with anti-Zionist activists continuing to disrupt events, harass Jewish students, and stage demonstrations related to how Israel conducts its foreign policy and manages its conflict with the Palestinians.
In October, for example, masked pro-Hamas activists breached an event held at Pomona College in California to commemorate the victims of the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in which Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists raped, murdered, and abducted women, children, and men during their rampage across southern Israel.
Footage of the act circulated on social media showed the group attempting to raid the room while screaming expletives and pro-Hamas dogma. They ultimately failed due to the prompt response of the Claremont Colleges Jewish chaplain and other attendees who formed a barrier in front of the door to repel them, a defense they mounted on their own as campus security personnel did nothing to stop the disturbance, according to video of the incident and witnesses who spoke to The Claremont Independent.
Following the incident, an anonymous group claimed credit for storming the event in a disturbing open letter.
“Satan dared not look us in the eyes,” said the note, which the group released on social media, while attacking event guests and Oct. 7 survivor Yoni Viloga. Appearing to threaten murder, the group added, “We let that coward know he and his fascists settler ideology are not welcome here nor anywhere. zionism is a death cult that must be dealt with accordingly [sic].”
In January, a sophomore and right-wing social media influencer at the University of Miami verbally attacked a Jewish student group, leading the school to defend free speech while saying that “lines can be crossed” in response.
“Christianity, which says love everyone, meanwhile your Bible says eating someone who is a non-Jew is like eating with an animal. That’s what the Talmud says,” Kaylee Mahony yelled at members of Students Supporting Israel (SSI) who had a table at a campus fair. She added, “They think that if you are not a Jew you are an animal. That’s the Talmud. That’s the Talmud.”
In December, an unidentified perpetrator twice vandalized the Chabad Jewish Center at Michigan State University (MSU) during the Hanukkah holiday. According to local reports, the vandal hurled rocks at and defaced the building’s entrance, shattering its glazing. Video footage of the suspect’s second trip to the Chabad center shows the vandal graffitiing the swastika, the emblem of Nazi Germany, next to which he spray-painted a message that said, “He’s back.”
That was not the first antisemitic incident to target a Jewish cultural center in the state of Michigan this academic year. In October, a man trespassed the grounds of the Jewish Resource Center, which serves University of Michigan students, and kicked its door while howling antisemitic statements.
The campus antisemitism crisis has changed the college experience for American Jewish students, affecting how they live, socialize, and perceive themselves as Jews, according to survey results released in February by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) in partnership with Hillel International.
A striking 42 percent of Jewish students reported experiencing antisemitism during their time on campus, and of that group, 55 percent said they felt that being Jewish at a campus event threatened their safety. The survey also found that 34 percent of Jewish students avoid being detected as Jews, hiding their Jewish identity due to fear of antisemitism. Meanwhile, 38 percent of Jewish students said they decline to utter pro-Israel viewpoints on campus, including in class, for fear of being targeted by anti-Zionists. The rate of self-censorship is significantly higher for Jewish students who have already been subjected to antisemitism, registering at 68 percent.
Higher education institutions have an added incentive to address antisemitism, as the reelection of US President Donald Trump brought to Washington, DC a chief executive who went on to fulfill his promise to tax the endowments of those that do not.
Shortly after taking office, Trump issued an executive order which directed the federal government to employ “all appropriate legal tools to prosecute, remove, or otherwise … hold to account perpetrators of unlawful antisemitic harassment and violence.” Additionally, the order initiated a full review of the explosion of campus antisemitism on US colleges across the country after Oct. 7, 2023, a convulsive moment in American history to which the Biden administration struggled to respond during the final year and a half of its tenure.
“This failure is unacceptable,” Trump said. “It shall be the policy of the United States to combat antisemitism vigorously, using all appropriate legal tools to prosecute, remove, or otherwise hold to account the perpetrators of unlawful antisemitic harassment and violence.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton Call Out Right-Wing Anti-Israel Influencers During Antisemitism Conference
US Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) speaks during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, March 11, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Julia Nikhinson
Two prominent US Republican senators issued stark warnings this week about what they described as a growing strain of antisemitism within parts of the conservative media ecosystem, using a Washington symposium hosted by the Republican Jewish Coalition and National Review to call out influential right-wing commentators and urge fellow Republicans to confront the problem directly.
Speaking at Tuesday’s event, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) sharply criticized conservative media personality Tucker Carlson, calling him “the single most dangerous demagogue in this country” and accusing him of amplifying extremist rhetoric and historical revisionism to a large online audience.
Cruz argued that antisemitic ideas have increasingly surfaced in segments of right-wing media over the past year and a half, particularly among younger audiences consuming political content online. While Republican leaders have often been quick to condemn openly extremist figures, Cruz said the party has been more reluctant to challenge more mainstream influencers who command massive followings.
“This is the beginning of a battle where our nation, our beliefs, our Constitution, the principles that built America, are under assault. And we need to gird ourselves for battle and defeat this garbage,” Cruz said to the audience.
Cruz warned that commentators with mainstream visibility can normalize rhetoric once confined to the political margins.
“I want us to be winning, but I’m not sure it is accurate as a descriptive manner that we are winning right now,” Cruz said.
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK) delivered a similar message during the symposium, criticizing unnamed right-wing “influencers” who he said were smuggling antisemitism into the conservative movement and promoting ideas incompatible with conservative principles. Cotton dismissed their influence as inflated and said their rhetoric echoed arguments more commonly associated with critics of Israel on the political left.
“I do not agree that I share a political movement or a political party with anyone who traffics antisemitism,” he said.
The remarks highlight an emerging divide within the Republican Party and the broader conservative movement over foreign policy, Israel, and the boundaries of acceptable political discourse. While establishment Republicans have long maintained strong support for Israel, a newer wave of populist commentators has increasingly questioned US involvement in Middle East conflicts and criticized Israel more aggressively.
Some of those commentators have drawn accusations from critics, including fellow conservatives, that their rhetoric veers into antisemitic tropes or conspiratorial narratives about Jewish influence.
Carlson has sparked backlash among conservatives over his consistent pattern of condemning Israel and platforming individuals who peddle antisemitic narratives. He has falsely suggested that Israel, the world’s lone Jewish state, oppresses and persecutes Christians.
During an interview with controversial podcaster Darryl Cooper, Carlson did not push back after Cooper argued that the US was on the “wrong side” of World War II and that former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, not Adolph Hitler, “was the chief villain” of the conflict. Cooper also suggested that the slaughter of six million Jews in concentration camps was “humane” because the Nazis did not have food to feed the “prisoners of war.”
Carlson also conducted a friendly interview with Nick Fuentes, an avowed antisemite and Holocaust denier, that was released last year. During the conversation, both men rebuked Israel and Zionism, with Carlson lambasting Christian Zionism as an affront to the values of Christianity.
In the two years following the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attacks in Israel, conservative commentators have found themselves increasingly split over Israel and foreign policy. Beyond Carlson, popular conservatives such as Steve Bannon and Megyn Kelly have also ramped up criticisms of Israel, oftentimes arguing that the Jewish state has embroiled the United States in unnecessary wars on their behalf.
Further, recent polling reveals the existence of a sizable antisemitic contingent within the GOP base, heavily concentrated among the younger cohorts which more frequently engage with content of online pundits. For example, the Manhattan Institute, a prominent US-based think tank, released a survey poll in December examining the evolving makeup of the Republican Party (GOP) and its current attitudes toward Israel and Jewish Americans.
According to the results, newer entrants to the GOP are more likely to be antisemitic.
“Anti-Jewish Republicans are typically younger, disproportionately male, more likely to be college-educated, and significantly more likely to be New Entrant Republicans,” the survey found. “They are also more racially diverse. Consistent church attendance is one of the strongest predictors of rejecting these attitudes; infrequent church attendance is, all else equal, one of the strongest predictors of falling into this segment.”
The data also showed that older GOP voters are much more supportive of Israel and less likely to express antisemitic views than their younger cohorts.
According to the data, 25 percent of GOP voters under 50 openly express antisemitic views as opposed to just 4 percent over the age of 50.
Startlingly, a substantial amount, 37 percent, of GOP voters indicate belief in Holocaust denialism. These figures are more pronounced among young men under 50, with a majority, 54 percent, agreeing that the Holocaust “was greatly exaggerated or did not happen as historians describe.” Among men over 50, 41 percent agree with the sentiment.