Items in this column include:
*Sarah Davis is a candidate in 78th Assembly District, not to be confused with others
*Motions heard in Superior Court in Poway of Chabad shooting case
*The Jewish ‘Tam’ of Shari Belafonte
Sarah Davis is a candidate in 78th Assembly District, not to be confused with others
SAN DIEGO – You’ve heard of Susan Davis. She’s the retiring congresswoman in the 53rd CD. You’ve heard of Sara Jacobs, she’s a candidate for Susan Davis’s seat. Now, meet Sarah Davis, who is a candidate in the 78th Assembly District. That seat is being vacated by Todd Gloria, who is running for mayor of San Diego.
At a meeting on Monday night of the Democratic Women’s Club of San Diego, “Sara Jacobs and I were joking that all we need is for someone named ‘Susan Jacobs’ to run,” Sarah Davis told me by telephone.
Will this cause name confusion? Will some people think that Sarah Davis is Susan Davis? Or perhaps will they confuse her with Sara Jacobs?” Besides their name similarity, all three women are members of the Jewish community, as is San Diego City Councilwoman Barbara Bry who is opposing Gloria in the mayor’s race.
It’s always hard to tell what voters may be thinking when they go to the polling place, but Sarah Davis says her ballot designation as a woman’s health provider and her campaign materials will help to establish in voters’ minds her independent identity.
Davis is running against Chris Ward, who succeeded Gloria as the City Councilman from the Third City Council District, which includes the Hillcrest neighborhood where Davis lives with her daughter. Even as Bry describes herself as running a campaign for the neighborhoods and against corporate campaign financiers backing Gloria, so too does Davis similarly cast herself as a neighborhood candidate against Ward.
A recent poll conducted by FM3 for the Voice of San Diego website found that 8o percent of the voters in the 78th Assembly District didn’t know Ward, and 84 percent don’t know Davis, but of those who did know the candidates, 24 percent favored Davis, 12 percent liked Ward, 9 percent favored other candidates, and 55 percent were undecided.
Davis says she opposes urban sprawl, wants to protect open spaces, and believes that short-term rentals take housing off the market, thereby adding to the affordable housing shortage. She says she believes the public sector should play some role in providing affordable housing, either by making land or financing available.
Davis is a licensed midwife, who has worked in community clinics “from Fallbrook all the way to the border” and was a co-founder of Birth Roots Women’s Health and Maternity Center in Chula Vista, later selling her share to her business partner.
“As a midwife, I have been involved in our state professional association—the California Association of Licensed Midwives – and through that, I had the opportunity to lobby on bills affecting maternal and child health, and to see how things work in Sacramento. The best way to have a strong voice would be to send one up there.”
Amplifying on her campaign website, Davis writes: “As a queer single mom of an amazing young daughter, I will show up for women and girls to return the love and support women and girls have always given me. In the Assembly I will use the reproductive justice lens to analyze every bill that touches my desk. I will advocate for paid family leave, access to midwives, primary health care providers, and care for seniors. I’ll fight for all care workers, ensuring that the care providers can make a dignified living wage and afford housing … in their communities. I will work to end mass incarceration, because families belong together and free.”
Another issue Davis said she is stressing in door-to-door campaigning is combating climate change. She said she supports measures to switch California’s energy use from fossil fuels and nuclear power to such alternative sources as wind, solar, geothermal, and hydro power.
Davis’s paternal grandparents immigrated to the United States from Eastern Europe early enough in the 1930s to avoid the Holocaust, but many of her grandfather Davis’s family in Poland and grandmother’s family in Czechoslovakia were later murdered by the Nazi regime.
After living in Illinois and Arizona, the Davis family moved to San Diego shortly after World War II. Her grandfather established Al Davis Furniture & Mattress World on University Avenue in Hillcrest, and brought up Davis’s father and aunt at Beth Jacob Congregation, which is Orthodox.
Davis’ mother Antonia grew up Catholic, but the family opted to send Davis and her brother, Taylor, to Beth Israel Day School, where her mother worked as an art teacher. At Pomona University, Davis was an active member of Hillel. Today, Davis is a member of Ohr Shalom Synagogue, where her daughter, Lucia, 7, attends the religious school.
One of the issues Davis will face as a single mother is where her daughter should live when the Legislature is in session. She said she and her daughter’s father have discussed this matter in depth, deciding that when Davis is in legislative session, typically Monday through Thursday, Lucia will live with her father, and when the Assembly is in recess, typically Friday through Sunday, her daughter will live with her.
We chatted about some of the issues facing the Jewish community, such as increasing anti-Semitism as perhaps typified by the murderous attack on the last day of Passover against Chabad of Poway during which Lori Gilbert Kaye was murdered and three other persons including Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein were wounded.
Davis said she believes California must take steps to reduce white nationalist violence, which she said typically stems from “young white men who feel alienated.” She said society “must make sure that we are noticing them when they go off the rails, not let them get there, teach empathy and about other cultures early in their lives, and also make sure that they are not getting access to guns.”
The candidate was asked about the ethnic studies curriculum that was rejected by the State Board of Education after various groups, including those representing Jewish communal interests, complained that it failed to deal with anti-Semitism, or positive Jewish contributions to the United States, while taking an anti-Israel view of the world as characterized by support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.
Davis responded that she believes many of the problems are being properly addressed in amendments. She said in trying to deal with white supremacy, of necessity the curriculum should deal with anti-Semitism because “that is one of the pillars of white supremacy.” She said the ethnic studies framework ought to permit studies of different ethnic groups based upon the areas where they live and come into contact with other ethnic groups. She said she thinks of the Jewish community as a religious community, rather than an ethnic one.
On the issue of BDS, Davis said she does not personally support boycotting Israel, but believes others have a constitutional free speech right to call for such boycotts.
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Motions heard in Superior Court in Poway of Chabad shooting case
The alleged shooter at the Poway Chabad has a preliminary hearing scheduled on Thursday to see whether he should stand trial for the murder of Lori Gilbert Kaye, and the wounding of Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein, Israeli visitor Almog Peretz, and his niece Noya Dahan, then 8.
The defendant, John Earnest, will appear in Superior Court before Judge Peter Deddeh, whose father, former State Senator Wadie P. Deddeh, recently died at the age of 99. What makes this hearing concerning an attack on a Jewish synagogue an “only in America” story is that the Deddehs were and are respected leaders of the large San Diego County community of Chaldeans, who are Arabic-speaking Christians from Iraq.
In Tuesday’s edition of The San Diego Union-Tribune, byliner Pauline Repard reported that Deputy Public Defender John O’Connell asked if the defendant could be unshackled during the preliminary hearing and permitted to wear civilian clothes instead of prison garb at the hearing. Judge Deddeh agreed that the defendant could be unshackled, but ruled he should remain in his prison jumpsuit.
Deddeh agreed to a prosecution motion to videotape Peretz’s testimony in the event that time runs out on his visa to visit the United States. Peretz lives in Sderot, in the area of Israel along the Gaza border that is a partnership region with the Jewish Federation of San Diego County.
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The Jewish ‘Tam’ of Shari Belafonte
Actress and model Shari Belafonte, who will address the Women’s Museum of California on October 8, may not herself be Jewish, but the daughter of Jamaican-born singer Harry Belafonte certainly is familiar with Jewish culture. Her husband, actor Sam Behrens, is Jewish, and her great-grandfather on her dad’s side was a Sephardic Jew from Holland. Many people learned how to sing “Hava Nagila” listening to her father’s version of the Israeli folk song.
Shari Belafonte’s speech on the challenges she has faced in life and career will be delivered at the Museum of Photographic Arts beginning at 7 p.m. A VIP reception in the Prado Restaurant will precede her speech.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com
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