soul
of blessed memory
Shoshana Cardin, Jewish Leader
Who Broke Multiple Glass
Ceilings, Dies At 91
TIMES OF ISRAEL
JTA
May 31 • 2018
jn
Johns Hopkins. She married
Jerome Cardin, an attorney,
real estate developer and
first cousin to the current
Democratic U.S. senator
from Maryland, Benjamin
Cardin. She taught school in
the Baltimore public school
system.
“Pregnant women were
not allowed to teach, so
Cardin quit when she was
expecting the first of her
four children: Steven, Ilene, Nina and
Sanford,” according to the JWA.
Jerome Cardin died in 1993 at age 69.
In addition to her involvement in
Jewish affairs, she was heavily involved
in state civic politics, serving in 1967 as
a delegate to Maryland’s Constitutional
Convention, and from 1974 to 1979 as
chair of Maryland’s Commission for
Women.
In 1984, she became the first woman
elected president of the Council of
Jewish Federations, a precursor to what
is now the Jewish Federations of North
America.
In December 1990, she was elected
to head the Conference of Presidents of
Major American Jewish Organizations,
at a time when the umbrella body was
working to secure Israel’s position with
the U.S. administration, a task compli-
cated by President George H.W. Bush’s
struggle to maintain good relations
with the Arab partners in his interna-
tional campaign to oust Iraqi troops
from Kuwait.
She was conference chair when, in
November 1991, Bush offered what
she described as a heartfelt apology
for making statements that September
that were perceived by the Jewish com-
munity to be a direct attack on the pro-
Israel lobby.
Earlier that year, Jewish groups had
been upset over his tough stand on
an Israeli request for U.S. guarantees
covering $10 billion in loans needed
for immigrant resettlement. Referring
to some 1,000 pro-Israel activists who
had arrived in Washington to lobby
on behalf of the loan guarantees, Bush
angered critics by saying in September
that he was one “lonely” guy “up against
some powerful political forces.”
Cardin, who met privately with Bush
prior to the larger meeting two months
later, said she and the other Jewish lead-
ers felt encouraged by the president’s
sincerity and good will. •
BALTIMORE JEWISH TIMES/STU ZOLOTOROW
S
hoshana Cardin,
a Baltimore phi-
lanthropist who
was the first woman to
chair her city’s Jewish
federation, the national
umbrella body of the
Jewish federation move-
ment and the powerful
Conference of Presidents
of Major American
Shoshana Cardin
Jewish Organizations,
died May 19, 2018, at
age 91.
Known for her intellect and leader-
ship capabilities, she was from 1988
to 1992 chairwoman of the National
Conference of Soviet Jewry, during a
time when the priorities of the Soviet
Jewry movement shifted from cam-
paigns to free Soviet Jews to efforts to
help resettle them in Israel.
Prior to that she was president of
the Council of Jewish Federations, the
representative body of 200 community
federations in the United States and
Canada.
Cardin also gained prominence in the
autumn of 1988 for spearheading oppo-
sition to efforts in the Israeli Knesset to
amend the Law of Return.
The so-called “Who Is a Jew” amend-
ment, which would have denied Israeli
citizenship to immigrants whose
conversion to Judaism did not meet
Orthodox standards, was ultimately
withdrawn in the face of overwhelming
pressure from American Jews.
Born Shoshana Shoubin to Latvian
parents in what was then British-
controlled Palestine, Cardin arrived
at age 2 in Baltimore, where she later
became active in local Jewish affairs.
One of her first major leadership
roles in the Jewish community was as
president of the Federation of Jewish
Women’s Organizations of Maryland
from 1965 to 1967.
She was the first woman to chair
the Associated Jewish Charities and
Welfare Fund of Baltimore, and she
served on the boards of the American
Jewish Joint Distribution Committee,
United Israel Appeal and United Jewish
Appeal.
She was also president of the Jewish
Telegraphic Agency from 1999 until
2001.
According to the Jewish Women’s
Archive, she earned a B.A. in English
at the University of California, Los
Angeles, after three years at Baltimore’s
62
Celebrated, Controversial
Author Philip Roth
Dies At Age 85
P
hilip Roth, whose notorious
novels about the sex drives
of American men gave way to
some of the most probing examina-
tions of the American Jewish condi-
tion in the 20th and 21st centuries,
died May 22, 2018, at age 85.
Early in his career, Roth drew
outrage with sometimes stinging
depictions of Jewish life, as well as
his graphic portrayal in his breakout
1969 novel Portnoy’s Complaint of the
protagonist’s sexual desires. Some
worried his work would endanger
American Jews, providing fodder
for anti-Semites. Roth, in his books,
poked fun at the wrath he incurred
from some in the Jewish community.
In his more than 25 books, one of
his recurring protagonists, Nathan
Zuckerman, is a novelist whose own
writings have similarly upset many
Jews. But after decades as one of
America’s leading literary lights, the
anger Roth once evoked was eclipsed
by acclaim. Unlike earlier Jewish
authors, Roth depicted the modern
Jew rather than the immigrant gen-
eration.
Long after lesser novelists
embraced semi-retirement, Roth
published three novels that came to
be known as the American Trilogy. In
American Pastoral (1997), I Married
a Communist (1998) and The Human
Stain (2000), Roth traced the upheav-
als of the 1940s Red Scare, the tur-
bulent 1960s and the debates over
political correctness in the 1990s.
His 2004 novel, The Plot Against
America, imagines an alternative his-
tory in which Franklin D. Roosevelt is
defeated in the presidential election
of 1940 by the pro-Nazi demagogue
Charles Lindbergh. In 2016, the book
was much discussed as a prescient
look at the populist tides that would
sweep Donald Trump into the Oval
Office over the more conventional
Democrat.
In addition to winning nearly
every literary award for writers in
English, Roth was also embraced
by the Jewish community over his
long career. Three of his books were
honored with the American Jewish
Book Award and, in 1998, he won
the Jewish Book Council’s Lifetime
Literary Achievement Award. The
Nobel Prize in Literature was one of
Roth
the rare honors that eluded him.
In 2014, the writer whose works
were once denounced as profane
and even self-hating was awarded
an honorary doctorate by the
Jewish Theological Seminary of
Conservative Judaism.
The seminary’s chancellor, Arnold
Eisen, had said about Roth, “We are
a community that treasures someone
who holds up such a penetrating and
insightful mirror to who we are and
reveals the dilemmas and contradic-
tions and aspirations of the commu-
nity. We are grateful for the mirror
even if not everything you see in it is
easy.”
In 2012, Roth announced he would
not be writing more books. In 2014,
he declared after a reading at New
York’s 92nd Street Y that he was done
with public appearances.
Roth often demurred when it
was suggested he was an American
Jewish writer. “I did not want to, did
not intend to and was not able to
speak for American Jews; I surely did
not deny, and no one questioned the
fact, that I spoke to them, and I hope
to others as well,” Roth wrote in his
essay “Writing About Jews.”
Roth was criticized by some as a
misogynist, owing to his frequent
portrayals of women as sex objects
and allegations about his behavior
in his personal relationships with
women. He was married twice and
had no children.
Nevertheless, appreciation
abounded for Roth’s contributions to
the Jewish world. •
Beth Kissileff contributed to this article.