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.