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And now, from the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and CNN Audio, the Axe Files, with your host David Axelrod.

Jackie Spear is leaving Congress, which is a loss for the country, an impactful and respected legislator from the San Francisco area she's led a life of service.

Informed by deep and sometimes tragic experience, she wrote a memoir about this a few years ago called Undaunted, which I highly recommend.

I sat down with her yesterday to speak about that journey and this challenging moment in our history. Here's that conversation.

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Jackie Spear, it's such an honor to be with you. I've done many, many, many of these podcasts with people in public life. I don't think I can count too many who stories are as inspiring as yours. So thank you so much for making time for us.

Well, it's an honor to be with you David. You're a great source of consult for all of us who work in this circus. So thank you for that.

We will talk about the circus, but I want to first talk about your life because actually it's been one of trial at times. And those trials are pretty relevant to the debates that we're having today. I know you must be thinking about that a lot.

But first tell me about your family and your folks and how you arrived on the great west coast of our country.

Very blue collar upbringing.

Neither parent went to college. My father was from Germany actually his father was a place in Buchenwald for a period of a month. And then they all escaped to Shanghai during the war years. And my father eventually came to San Francisco because he had seen a movie called San Francisco and was captivated by it.

He rented a room from my mother who had saved her nickels and dimes by not taking the street cart of work. And she bought a pair of flats in San Francisco. And she was writing out rooms in her mother and sister moved in with her.

And that's how they met. And so I was raised in a very blue collar family. My father was a a teamster. My mother became an adult education, a postry teacher and worked until her 90th year.

And they lived to be 91 and 93.

Her family was from Armenia. So I had the genocide holocaust experience on both sides of my life. And she lost family members in the genocide. And you know there was a cloud that followed her around.

Because most Armenians had this this great angst about what had happened to their people and how they were you know the first genocide of the 20th century.

Is it April 24th? Is that the that's right. Yes, you know, which is the date in which we remember that genocide, but the whole debate was whether we could call it a genocide because the Turks are very sensitive to that issue.

You must have been you must be right in the middle of that discussion all the time.

I certainly was and you know finally when we were I mean I was calling on Kim Kardashian to talk to Donald Trump to try and get him to finally make the statement but you know finally at both the house and Senate we pass the resolution by voice vote in the Senate I might add.

And only I think 11 no votes in the house, but it took 10 12 years of gnashing of teeth and then President Biden this year spoke up very powerfully about the Armenian genocide that was the first.

I genocide of the 20th century killing 1.6 Armenians how how much you you mentioned child of the Holocaust on one side the Armenian genocide and the other how much of that hover over your family how much was that part of the family lower.

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