Background, Positions, Ambitions

My name is David Light. Born in 1986, I graduated from Cleveland Heights Highschool in 2005. In Akron I studied Theatre and Marketing as an undergrad, and then in 2011 I moved to South Korea where I was an English Teacher for the next 11 years. While there I received my MA in Applied Linguistics. I moved back to Cleveland in 2022, and I’ve been working as a Fraud Investigator for the past three years.

As far as a platform, I’m fully onboard with progressive economic populism. So Medicare for all (or similar), Universal Pre-K, Expanded parental leave, and just in general investing in the average Americans that make up our communities.

However, those aren’t the reasons I decided I needed to run. It was horror and outrage that moved me to act in this moment. Horror at the human rights violations this fascist regime has already started committing in huge numbers, and horror at the way my heritage and my people’s history is being weaponized to commit those attacks.

You see, I am Jewish. Not particularly religious, though raised so. But my Jewish Grandfather and his brother Faught and struggled as American Soldiers in Nazi Germany to bring about the end of those atrocities. And I was raised from early childhood to know and understand that history, not just how bad it ended up getting but also how it started and advanced.

And to not only see that history forgotten and ignored around me, but even worse to see a poor facsimile of remembrance wielded as the tool of this new iteration? Too see that this time around, it’s the spurious accusation of antisemitism which the state is using as pretext to do the things the antisemites did.

And make no mistake, that weaponization has been a bipartisan effort, lead in large part by Chuck Schumer, who disgraces the memory of our history every time he opens his mouth to comment about how much he abhors some unspecified view that a Palestinian victim of fascist violence supposedly held. All funded by AIPAC, who has become nothing more than a foreign propaganda arm of an apartheid state.

It’s just too much. It has to be opposed, and I think it has to be opposed by someone like me. That’s how I got here. That’s what’s keeping me going.