On Thursday evening, Tanya Tsikanovsky, a Republican Zionist lesbian who is running for City Council in West Hollywood, Calif., was scheduled to have a “meet-and-greet” at the city’s only lesbian bar.
Within 20 minutes of the event being advertised online, the bar “got flooded with so much hate over platforming a Zionist that they canceled the event,” she told JNS.
“Last year, I was told I shouldn’t go to Dyke Day LA because I am a Zionist,” she said. “We are being effectively pushed out of all of our queer spaces, and so I’m particularly running in a city that has a 48% queer population in order to make sure we don’t get pushed out.”
Tsikanovsky told JNS that she has been a “lifelong Zionist and a lesbian activist, and now I am putting all of my effort into fighting for the Jewish people.”
The head of operations and development for ThinkAgain, a media nonprofit that fights Jew-hatred and misinformation, used to work for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Tsikanovsky, who appeared on a panel at the Jewish American Summit in Los Angeles on Aug. 30, is among 14 candidates running for one of three spots on the City Council. She told JNS that most of the other 13 are anti-Israel.
Chelsea Lee Byers, an incumbent member of the City Council, used to run her school’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter, Tsikanovsky said.
“It’s quite the saturated race,” she told JNS. “I think I have a pretty good shot.”
Tsikanovsky was born and raised in Los Angeles, where her parents came from the Soviet Union as Jewish refugees in 1979.
“My parents raised me with a belief and a knowing that being a Jew is in so much a part of everything that I am as a human being, that being a good human being and spreading tikun olam and having integrity to me are Jewish values,” she told JNS. (The Hebrew phrase refers to “repairing the world.”)
“So much of how I treat the world and live in the world is in a Jewish way,” she said.
“For me, being a Jew and a Zionist are one and the same thing—that when we say the Shema, we say it to Israel, we don’t say it to anywhere else,” she told JNS. (The core Hebrew prayer begins, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one.”)
“When people want to make the distinction or say that it’s different, I think it’s crazy,” she said.
Experts told JNS last month that there has been no discernible shift among progressive LGBT activists and groups in the ways they view the threat of Islamism after an Islamist attacker killed a woman and injured 29 people at a Berlin Pride event in July.
Tsikanovsky agrees that there hasn’t been a shift.
“Unfortunately, they seem to think that violence committed by anyone who is perpetuating Islamism is, I guess, a response to white oppression,” she told JNS.
“They see it as oppressor versus oppressed,” she said. “They’re not realizing that we’re being taken over by an ideology that will take away our freedom and our Western values.”
