By Manny Frishberg , JTNews Correspondent
This September, as the state adopts a new way of holding primaries, voters will find Jewish candidates on both the Democratic and Republican ballots. In some cases they are facing competition from other candidates in their parties, while others will get a free pass to the November general election ballot. As in past years, nonpartisan races, like those for judgeships, will be voted on by everyone and will go to anyone receiving over 50 percent of the votes cast September 14 – or see a run-off in November if no one gets a clear majority.
Debi Golden is running for the state House of Representatives as a Democrat, seeking to represent the 48th District, which stretches across the Eastside from Lake Sammamish to Lake Washington and includes at least parts of the cities of Redmond, Medina, Bellevue, Kirkland and Clyde Hill. Debi decided to throw herself in to the fray at more or less the last minute. Until then she was just another citizen expressing her frustrations with the way Olympia was handling – or not handling – the issues facing the state.
“I had been bemoaning the inaction of the legislature on several issues and was at a Kerry fundraiser,” she said, “when Ross Hunter overheard me.”
Hunter, who holds the other House seat from the district said, “There’s an open seat in the second position, why don’t you run for it?”
So, on the last day for filing she placed her name in nomination. She believes that her years as an instructional designer at Boeing have prepared her to help break through the current deadlock there.
“I figure I can use some good, strong interpersonal skills I developed there to get people to sit down and talk things over and work things out, rather than be so partisan,” said Golden.
Golden was a member of Temple B’nai Torah for a dozen years and has served on the board of the National Council of Jewish Women and began her advocacy work lobbying both in Olympia and in Washington D.C. with NCJW.
“The whole notion of tikkun olam has always colored my life,” she said. “Somebody has to step up to the plate and do it.”
Golden, who said she was “a public school teacher many years ago” and served as the Clyde Hill Elementary School PTSA president for two years, worked for Boeing for several years. She moved on to Bellevue Community College a few months ago to build medical informatics and business courses. Her husband of 30 years, a medical doctor, practiced as a pediatrician for 15 years before becoming a child and adolescent psychiatrist. As a result, Golden’s two main issues are fixing the state’s patchwork health coverage and “finding a stable funding source for the education system.”
“I see a lot of health benefits being eroded, costs spiraling out of control,” she said, “and I see it getting worse. They run around doing band-aid solutions,” Golden said of the current legislative response. “I thought we have a little bit of time to do something much more thoughtful to fix the whole system.”
As the only candidate on the Democratic ticket, Golden will automatically move up to the general election, where she will face off against Republican incumbent Rodney Tom.
“We are starting six month behind but we’ve caught up, four months’ worth,” she said.
Just to the south of Debi’s district lies the 41st, which includes part of Bellevue as well as Mercer Island, Factoria and Newcastle, abutting the cities of Renton and Issaquah, two Jewish candidates are running for separate seats in that district: Democrat Brian Weinstein for State Senate and Republican Fern Spady for the second position House seat. Since neither faces a primary challenge in the primary, they both expect to appear on the November ballot.
Weinstein, who lives on Mercer Island, plans to challenge two-term incumbent Sen. Jim Horn, who he describes as “an entrenched conservative Republican” and a career politician, having served in the state House and as Mayor of Mercer Island before being elected to his Senate seat. Horn has run unopposed in recent elections.
Weinstein lived in several states before moving to his current house in 1994. He was Bar Mitvah’ed in Jackson Heights, Queens four months before his family pulled up roots to follow a job offer for his father in Dallas. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1976 with a degree in economics and returned to Texas for law school.
After being accepted to the bar in 1981, Weinstein practiced law in Texas until he came to Washington State. His first two children, Trevor and Ariele, were born in Texas and his third, a daughter, was born in Seattle 10 years ago. For 20 years, Weinstein represented victims of asbestos exposure.
Four months ago, he read an article in his daughter’s school paper about Education Day in Olympia that mentioned that Horn “was unable to meet with them.”
“That just angered me,” he said. “I thought that it should be the duty of a state senator to at least meet with his constituents, especially a constituent like a member of the school board or the PTA that represents a larger group of people.”
Seeing that Horn had been elected without opposition, he decided this spring that he would give the long-time incumbent a run for his money. Weinstein, who attended the same Orthodox synagogue as Don Rickles in New York, now attends Temple B’nai Torah.
“I try to raise my children with Jewish values,” he said, and tries to live by Hillel’s dictum of “‘What is harmful to yourself, don’t do to others.’ That’s the kind of philosophy I try to live by and that’s the type of philosophy I’d take to the state Senate.”
Weinstein said he considers the education to be the most important issue facing the state and has made it his number one priority.
“Right now in the state of Washington, out of every 10 kids who enter kindergarten, only two enter college. Out of every three kids in high school, one will drop out,” he said. “Those statistics are so horrible that you have to do something about it. If you don’t even meet with the PTA,” he continued, “how can you do something about it?”
Spady also counts education as one of her top legislative priorities but her approach emphasizes “deregulation, competition and parental choice” as the core of a solution.
“I’ve worked down in the legislature for 10 years as a citizen-activist on education, trying to pass Charter Schools and other accountability legislation,” said Spady. “After 10 years down there, when I was asked whether I was interested in running, I really thought a lot about it.
“I was involved so much in helping to craft legislation, I’ve been down there late at night on the end of the last days; I’ve worked with the staff and I’ve worked with a lot of the media,” she said. “I knew what I was going to do when I got down there and I really felt that it was important to go beyond the citizen-activist role into having a seat at the table.”
A member of the Dick’s Drive-Ins restaurant family, she has spent her lifetime in local small business, where her experiences have led her to conclude that “too often small businesses have to battle with state government just to survive.”
She promises to work on streamlining government regulations to improve the business climate in Washington, which she sees as key to creating more jobs and growing the state budget.
Spady said she attended Bet Alef Meditative Synagogue for a long time, although she said with philosophical differences after the Iraq War began, “that became sort of a controversial place” and “became too political.”
“One of the really exciting things I have to say is I’ve met more Jewish people outside of a temple situation running for office than I ever did in any other aspect of my life,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting that.”
Andrea Darvas approaches her legal career from a unique perspective. When she was just an infant, her parents, already Holocaust survivors, took their chance and escaped from Hungary following the unsuccessful uprising against the Communist state.
“Like many other Hungarians at the time, they escaped with nothing more than the clothes on their backs,” she said. “I grew up with a real reverence for the liberties promised by the United States Constitution – individual rights, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, due process, equal access to justice, equality of opportunity – all of those things that my parents hadn’t had when they were growing up.”
These are the things that Darvas has said make her want to become a judge, so she is running for the open 23rd position on the King County Superior Court.
Darvas and her husband David Heller have an independent law office, Heller and Darvas, primarily representing small business owners and individuals in civil cases. She counts both her broad client base and her 13-plus years “operating a small business” as qualifiers for her becoming a judge.
While she is quick to praise the overall quality of the local bench, she said she believes the breadth of their experiences with different segments of the community should be expanded.
“I think it’s important that judges understand where people are coming from,” she said. “While it may feel like a routine case to the judge, who has heard many hundreds or thousands of cases, that case is unique and vitally important to the people whose case it is.”
Darvas’s twin children, Tom and Elizabeth, are both 2003 graduates of the Northwest Yeshiva High School. Darvas and her husband have been members of Congregation Beth Shalom for almost 15 years and raised their children in the Conservative tradition, but she said she came to Judaism after striking out on her own.
Also in the race for this seat are Julia Garratt, a pro tem judge for King County since 1998, and Eric Weston, who claims unique experience among potential judges on the September ballot as both a prosecutor and a public defender in his years in King County. “Just to get across to people that I’m not an ideologue,” he said, “I am proud to have spent my life seeking justice.”