By Melanie Nathan, April 01, 2026.
I left West Hollywood for the Bay Area many years ago, yet West Hollywood lives in me. It is where I first landed as an immigrant, coming to terms with my sexuality in the 1980s. It is where I found refuge, safety, and a place to belong. It gave me that. It gave me home. It is where I have made lifelong friends and where I am still invited to speak on the Dyke March stages.
I stood among those who did not inherit this city as a Gay city, but built it as such. I was there when being openly queer was not a given, when safety was fragile, dignity contested, and existence itself an act of defiance. We fought for it in discos, in the streets, the courts, and in the quiet, painful battlegrounds of our own homes.
West Hollywood (WEHO) was built deliberately by people who understood that rights, once denied, must be defended relentlessly. That is what is at stake now.
As a member of the LGBTQI+ community, as a Jew, a Zionist, and a Lesbian, like others, I brought all of who I am into my part. Nonetheless, we did not weaponize identity. We did not reduce it to slogans. We stood on principle, on the Constitution, on equality under the law, and on the belief that dignity is universal and rights belong to everyone.
Identity carries responsibility. It demands integrity. It answers to something greater than oneself.
Tanya Tsikanovsky, who brands herself as “highlyjewish,” is seeking a seat on West Hollywood’s City Council, a role that demands moral clarity, historical awareness, and a commitment to protecting the vulnerable. My message is: Identity is not qualification, and leadership in West Hollywood insists on judgment grounded in morality and maturity.
However, what Tsikanovsky demonstrates instead is alignment with a MAGA ideology rooted in loyalty to Donald Trump, and a 68% presidential disapproval rate, the worst in modern history, with an agenda that delivers the promise of Project 2025, which systematically targets LGBTQI+ people, immigrants, women, people of color, and refugees, undermining democracy and its norms.
Tsikanovsky speaks openly about her support for Trump, even as she acknowledges losing friends over it, and yet continues to amplify it. Courted by right-wing media and organizations, her choice of cruelty, or her failure to see it, is as detestable as it is disqualifying.
Either way that is what she is offering West Hollywood.
Her public record removes any doubt about judgment: Through all her commentary on social media I have seen nothing talking about the erosion and dismantling of human rights and civil rights. Though, I have seen her concern for the closure of WEHO businesses, which she blames on the minimum wage being too high. (Oy vey!)
When millions of Americans took to the streets in the “No Kings” march this past weekend, exercising their First Amendment rights, she expressed hers by condemning the marchers as “nutbags.” Yet these are the very people she seeks to represent.
And when confronted with warnings about authoritarianism, she reduces it to a childish claim: She says, “if Trump were truly a fascist, surely all his critics would already be in jail.” That is not analysis. It is willful ignorance revealing a chronic myopia that surfs its way through all her videos, riding baby waves during an earthquake which begs for a tidal.
Authoritarianism advances along a trajectory. It tests limits, normalizes overreach, and expands power incrementally. It is stopped by recognizing it early, not by waiting for its final form. West Hollywood stands as the antidote to that trajectory.
In her campaign, she leans heavily on identity, refugee roots, Jewish, Zionist, lesbian. On paper, those identities mirror my own. That is precisely why I speak. I also speak to honor all those before me, and alongside me. I also speak for the future of our youth. There is more to be done.
Leadership demands grounding and building on legacy. Identity without principle is only a performance. And performance in service of cruelty and destruction is disqualifying. West Hollywood was not built on identity alone. It was built on principle and that is the one guiding light that should helm a campaign and one’s service.
The brutal killing of Renee Good demanded moral clarity. It demanded our tears. It called for assertive solidarity. It called for leadership , outrage and humanity. Instead what we saw from Tanya Tsikanovsky was dissonance, apathy, and callous language that echoed far off in the distance with knee-jerk narratives, rather than centering the victim or the community.
In West Hollywood, when community is attacked, leaders must be ready to fully show up. They must stand with the community. They center dignity, humanity, and truth. That is the standard. And that is a standard Tanya Tsikanovsky’s own public record shows she cannot meet.
A seat on the West Hollywood City Council requires commitment to the principles that built one of the most valued LGBTQ+ cities in the world, not alignment with an out of touch unpopular ideology that actively seeks to destroy those foundations. West Hollywood is not a platform for a MAGA influencer – over-ambitious, under-qualified, to springboard into the next political theater.
This Article first appeared in the West Hollywood Times – HERE
Facebook got interesting because Ms. HighlighJewish ventured onto my FB Page….. in doing so basically rooted everything I have said here. The discussion was in reponse to a my critique of her Video where she uses Trumps performative comments about the Iranian Soccer Team to suggest that he is pro immigrant, pro refigee and pro asylum seeker.
1 Here is her and my FB conversation which occured after I posted the video
2. Here is the Video – watch – you will hear my voice over – nowhere does she above address the issues I raise in the video, insteadd hiding behind identity and being a “victim” of Jew hate. She fails to address her support for MAGA – its mind boggling….
O-blog-dee-o-blog-da 