On a recent rainy morning, Chesa Boudin woke up sick. It had been a busy few weeks for the man who upended San Franciscos political establishment by winning the race for district attorney in November. The 39-year-old attorney was on the kind of schedule that would threaten anyones immune system.

After nosing out Suzy Loftus in a close-fought race, Boudin was hounded by media requests, due in part to his remarkable life story.

Moreover, he had to mend fences with the mayor, the head of the police union and other high-ranking city officials who supported (sometimes vociferously) his opponent, Loftus, who in October had been appointed interim D.A. by Mayor London Breed, making her the incumbent in the race.

Boudin also had to start make staffing decisions for the D.A.s office, which employs more than 200 people, and plot out the first 100 days of his four-year term after he is sworn in on Jan. 8.

Oh, he also got married soon after being elected, to Valerie Block, a brain researcher at the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences.

If the New Yorker called for a profile, said Kelsey Russom, the manager of his transition team, wed have to say no.

Still, Boudin, who is proudly Jewish, took time to speak with J. by phone in mid-December, apologizing for his weak voice. An ardent criminal justice reformer, he spoke about the challenges facing his city, including homelessness and drug use, about Jewish values and about a commitment to human dignity that he says has guided his professional life.

Boudin is no stranger to the national spotlight. In 2002, the New York Times profiled the young Yale undergraduate underneath the headline From a Radical Background, a Rhodes Scholar Emerges.

The radical tag, however, isnt exactly his. It was Boudins parents, David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin, who were members of the militant, communist, anti-war group the Weather Underground in the 1970s and who paid a heavy price for their involvement.

In 1981, when Boudin was just 14 months old, his parents participated in an attempted robbery of a Brinks armored vehicle that led to a shootout near Nyack, New York. Three people died in the botched heist, including two police officers, and both his parents were sentenced to long prison terms.

The young Boudin, in turn, was adopted by Weather Underground leaders Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who raised him in Chicago.

Kathy Boudin published academic papers while incarcerated and later became a professor at Columbia University, after her release in 2003. She is the co-director and co-founder of the schools Center for Justice.

Gilbert remains incarcerated at Wende Correctional Facility in upstate New York, having been sentenced to 75 years for three counts of felony murder.

Both Gilbert and Kathy Boudin are Jewish. He had a bar mitzvah as a youth in the Boston area, and though she had a more secular upbringing in New York City, her Jewish identity became stronger in prison.

Many of the people she lived with in prison were religious, Chesa Boudin said. They drew on their faith to persevere in the face of lengthy sentences.

Boudin recalled how a nun at the prison helped develop a center that facilitated visits between incarcerated mothers and their children. If it werent for Sister Elaine and the Childrens Center, I would not have a meaningful relationship with my mother, Boudin said.

Chesa Boudin went to the University of Chicago Lab School in Hyde Park, a day school populated by the children of university professors. His adoptive parents were, in fact, intellectuals university professors themselves. He often has said his experience provides a stark contrast to the estimated one in seven U.S. adults who have had an immediate family member behind bars for at least a year.

The experience of visiting a loved one behind bars is not unique, he said. Whats unique about my situation is because of the support, and second chances obviously, the choices I made, and hard work, too Im in a very different situation than most people experiencing family incarceration.

When you [take a kids] parents away at 14 months old [and] put them behind bars, you dramatically decrease the chances of that child ever becoming a Rhodes Scholar, or winning public office.

Boudin said his upbringing was secular, but his family often celebrated Passover and Hanukkah with the family of his adoptive mother, Bernardine; her father, Bernard Dohrn, was Jewish. And almost all of his close friends at the Lab School were Jewish, he said, leading to him attending a bar or bat mitzvah almost every weekend.

Judaism has been a constant theme in my life, he said, mentioning ancestors who fled from the fringes of the Russian Empire because of anti-Semitism and poverty. The fight for survival in the face of adversity has always been part of the tradition to remember the real challenges that the Jewish people had to survive.

People today find themselves in similar crises refugees and people less fortunate than us, who are lost in the desert, so to speak.

Boudin said Jewish values, broadly defined, are about a commitment to human dignity rooted in the history of the Jewish people, and in the interpretation of the Torah. He mentioned the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, when Abraham pleads with God to save a city of sinners, because, he paraphrased, What if there are righteous people there?

It has absolutely informed the way I see the world, he said.

Boudin is a public defender, not a prosecutor, who ran on a progressive platform backed by the likes of Sen. Bernie Sanders and the Black Lives Matter movement, and he was the only one among the four D.A. candidates who has never prosecuted a case.

We have to make it easier to get help than to get high.

His election reflected a growing frustration among voters with the U.S. criminal justice system, which locks up more people per capita than any other nation, and incarcerates African Americans at a rate 5.9 times greater than whites.

Hes part of a national trend of young, progressive candidates seeking, and sometimes winning, prosecutor offices, such as Larry Krasner (Philadelphia D.A.), Kim Foxx (states attorney for Cook County, Illinois) and Tiffany Cabn (who lost the Democratic primary for D.A. in Queens County, New York, but not before gaining national notoriety and the support of Sanders, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

During his campaign, Boudins pledges included: tackling racial inequalities in the citys criminal justice system, in which more than 40 percent of people arrested are black; ending a cash-bail system that he says unfairly penalizes the poor; and halting the prosecution of quality of life crimes which he says jam up the system and only criminalize poverty and homelessness.

While Boudin has become a champion for progressives, some people wonder whether his vision for San Francisco will help or hurt.

To many, San Francisco is beset by drug addiction, homelessness and high rates of property crime, as its economic inequality is among the worst of any city in the world.

In response to an ACLU questionnaire, Boudin said he would not prosecute crimes such as public camping, offering or soliciting sex, public urination or blocking a sidewalk responses that raised eyebrows and garnered widespread media attention.

Its hard to believe that San Franciscos leaders could make the city any worse, Fox News Tucker Carlson said. But this guys certainly going to try.

Even the San Francisco Police Officers Association called him the No. 1 choice of criminals and gang members in some of the $400,000 they spent on campaign ads against him. The SFPOA said he would do away with gang enhancements, which increase penalties for crimes committed by alleged gang members; Boudin has said gang enhancements often are racially unjust and racist.

In the cases where we see serious conduct, we can already impose serious punishments, he said.

After the election, Boudin said he sat down for a cordial lunch with the chief of police and the sheriff. He also met with Mayor Breed, who was among the many influential supporters of Loftus (a list that also included Gov. Gavin Newsom, Senators Kamala Harris and Dianne Feinstein and the S.F. Democratic Party).

The common theme of those meetings?

Everybody recognizes this city needs a district attorneys office thats functioning, Boudin said. From that perspective, they want to see me succeed. At the end of the day, we want the same things a safer, fairer San Francisco.

Speaking about highly visible drug use, homelessness and other problems in downtown San Francisco, Boudin said he shares the frustration, shares the despair.

People who visit the city who live in the city see abject poverty, desperation, addiction and mental illness being untreated, he said. I share the need to address that problem.

In San Francisco, it is not uncommon to see people using heroin or meth in the Tenderloin, but in California, possession of drugs for personal use is a misdemeanor that often goes unprosecuted. Boudin said he does not think putting drug addicts in jail is an effective use of resources, nor is it an effective response to drug addiction.

I think there is ample, empirical evidence that the war on drugs has not succeeded by any reasonable metric, he said. It has not decreased addiction [or] access to drugs, and its been costly financially and socially. A study released in September by the D.A.s office showed nearly half of people convicted of crimes in San Francisco were arrested again within three years.

During his campaign, Boudin pledged to expand diversion programs for the mentally ill and drug-addicted to keep them out of the criminal justice system, which appears to many an inadequate response to problems of human despair. Of the four D.A. candidates, he was the only one who did not want more funding for the D.A.s office.

If he can win support from the S.F. Board of Supervisors and other officials, he hopes to build a centralized mental-health facility run by health professionals, rather than law enforcement, and shut down county jail No. 4, which is said to be seismically unsafe, redirecting funds to mental health and drug treatment.

Jails do nothing to treat the root cause of crime, he wrote in a campaign platform description. Rather, jails often victimize and destabilize an already vulnerable population, who are then released to the streets with no treatment plan or housing, often leading to more crime.

In San Francisco, he said, We have to make it easier to get help than to get high.

Boudin told J. that on Passover he often visited his mother at her maximum-security prison. There werent many Jews inside, but there were enough to merit a seder led by a local rabbi. It was one of the only times, Boudin recalled, he was allowed to visit his mother outside of visiting hours.

He vividly remembers searching for the afikomen in the visiting room, an experience he called profound.

The relevance of the Exodus story to his lifes work is not lost on him, and after being elected, he gained even more understanding of that story.

I see it as [being] about a search for redemption, he said. As a public defender, my focus was on saving people from prison. But as district attorney-elect, I take a broader view. Its about public safety, redemption and healing.

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Chesa Boudin, San Francisco's DA-elect talks homelessness, Jewishness and taking on the establishment - The Jewish News of Northern California