Jewish, LGBTQ+, and progressive groups denounce Pride harassment of Jewish politician Scott Wiener

JTA – A growing number of Jewish, Democratic, and LGBTQ+ figures are condemning the harassment of Jewish congressional candidate Scott Wiener by antizionists at the San Francisco Trans March on Friday. 

Wiener’s political opponent, meanwhile, did not condemn the incident directly when asked, instead disavowing “threats of violence and hate speech” more generally. 

Wiener had been filmed at the march while several activists, including the man filming him, surrounded him and yelled at him about Gaza and Israel; he ultimately left the scene. The incident followed another at which Wiener was accused of supporting “genocide” while at a sports bar, and preceded a filmed antizionist harassment of another local Jewish LGBTQ+ politician at a San Francisco Pride march. 

The incidents have again triggered discourse about Jewish inclusion in LGBTQ+ and other left-wing spaces as antizionist activists become more numerous and strident. 

Assigned Media, a popular trans news site, denounced the Trans March harassment of Wiener led by local activist Dimitry Yakoushkin as “left antisemitism”. 

“We need to reckon with the fact that Yakoushkin was able to incite an outpouring of rage against a Jewish man by mentioning Gaza,” the author, Evan Urquhart, wrote on Monday. “The only explanation for that is antisemitism. Enough attendees at the Trans Pride March were open to seeing a Jewish man as a proxy for Israel that Yakoushkin was able to whip them into a frenzy for his own purposes.” 

Donations have also poured into Wiener’s campaign following the incident, with his campaign telling The San Francisco Standard that he received his highest single-day donation numbers afterwards. Yet the harassment has raised questions about the viability of Jewish candidates like Wiener, who has said Israel committed “genocide” in Gaza while still seeking to maintain a liberal Zionist identity. 

Wiener, who is gay and is running for the seat being vacated by former US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, wrote in a lengthy statement that he had been chased out of the annual Trans March event while on his way to a Pride Shabbat. It was, he said, the first time he had been unable to participate in the event since it launched 22 years ago. 

“They were so physically and verbally aggressive that it was impossible for me to safely remain in the park,” Wiener said in his statement, noting the protesters had “made statements about my ‘Israeli handlers’, among many other inaccurate, extreme, and vile statements”. 

The California Senate’s Democratic statehouse caucus condemned the harassment as “unacceptable”, calling Wiener “a fearless champion for the LGBTQ+ community even when it was not politically popular”. The caucus didn’t mention Israel or antisemitism in its statement. 

“We are saddened and appalled that Senator Scott Wiener experienced antisemitic invectives, harassment, and physical intimidation while attempting to join the Trans March,” Jaimie Krass, president of the LGBTQ+ Jewish organisation Keshet, said in a statement to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA). 

San Francisco’s Jewish mayor, Daniel Lurie, the local Jewish Community Relations Council, and The Nexus Project, a national antisemitism watchdog group that is more forgiving of antizionist critiques than the Anti-Defamation League, all called the harassment of Wiener antisemitic. 

At a Pride breakfast on Sunday morning hosted by a historic San Francisco LGBTQ+ Democratic group, other local and national leaders expressed support for Wiener. 

“Hate has no place in our community,” Imani Rupert-Gordon, president of the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, told Wiener at the breakfast, according to the Bay Area Reporter, a local LGBTQ+ news site. “Scott, you were treated horribly.” 

San Francisco Board of Supervisors president Rafael Mandelson, who is gay and Jewish, said that what happened to Wiener happens to elected gay Jews far too often. “It is about Jew hatred. It is wrong.” Wiener himself did not mention either of his harassment incidents in his speech at the breakfast, according to the Reporter. 

A spokesperson for Wiener didn’t respond to a JTA request for further comment. A request for comment to the Trans March was also unreturned; the march has released a statement on a separate incident, in which several participants were arrested following an altercation with police. 

The targeting of Wiener was especially notable given that he has been celebrated locally for years as a lawmaker with a strong record on trans rights, something acknowledged by Yakoushkin, who in a video he filmed and posted, yells, “I think your policy on the genocide in Gaza is terrible” as others yell expletives at the state senator. 

“It’s sad because while he’s written some good legislation for queers, hes [sic] ultimately a genocidal-supporting centre right shill,” Yakoushkin wrote on social media in a post accompanying his video of himself harassing Wiener. On Instagram, Yakoushkin called Wiener a “Yimby zionist”, using shorthand for activists who push for more housing. 

A JTA request to Yakoushkin for comment was not returned. A life coach, Yakoushkin told one critic on X, “i[f] he was great on Gaza I’d still roast his ass.” 

Wiener had said during his primary campaign earlier in the month, in which he came in first, that he believed Israel had committed “genocide” in Gaza, a shift that came after pressure from the left and one that cost him a leadership role in the statehouse’s Jewish caucus and led to backlash from the Bay Area Jewish community. 

Local antizionist activists have continued to target him. The Trans March incident was the second such harassment Wiener faced in the past week. Days earlier, a local artist filmed himself confronting the candidate at a sports bar, shouting, “Wiener, you gotta get the fuck up out my hood, bro,” and “It’s free Palestine here, you already know what it is – we against the genocide.” 

The artist, Jesus “Frisco Lens” Coba, didn’t return a JTA request for comment. In his statement, Wiener said that Coba had in 2023 “stalked me on a plane and in an airport, shouting at me about my ‘tainted bloodline’”. 

San Francisco Supervisor Connie Chan, who is running against Wiener in the November congressional runoff, didn’t directly address Wiener’s harassment in a statement she sent after JTA requested comment. 

“As an elected leader, and a candidate running for office, I have experienced the rough and tumble of San Francisco politics, including folks who disagree with us publicly and sometimes vehemently,” she said. “And I accept and understand this responsibility. And as someone who has been a target of hate and threats of violence, I stand firm against threats of violence and hate speech. There is no place for hate and violence in our city.” 

Chan had also attended the Trans March and was feted there, including by some of the activists who harassed Wiener on camera. Asked by JTA if the harassment of Wiener was antisemitic, a Chan spokesperson responded, “In this moment, what matters is how State Senator Scott Wiener felt and feels about the interactions. We must stand in solidarity against hate whenever someone tells us they are experiencing hate.” 

Democratic Representative Ro Khanna, who represents a different Bay Area district, called the harassment of Wiener “simply wrong”. In the same statement, he promoted legislation to end the sale of military weapons to Israel. 

“There is no place for harrasment [sic] or physical violence in our democracy,” Khanna, among the House’s fiercest Israel critics, wrote on X. “Let’s focus on passing @RepThomasMassie amendment to zero aid to Israel. Hold elected officials accountable. But do so in the spirit of building a politics of conviction and dignity, not insult and aggression.” A representative for Khanna didn’t return a JTA request for further comment. 

Also over the weekend, an antizionist activist filmed themselves harassing Manny Yekutiel, a local Jewish restaurateur running for San Francisco’s board of supervisors, while Yekutiel marched in a Pride event. The activist criticised Yekutiel, who is also queer, over having hosted Hen Mazzig, an LGBTQ+ pro-Israel activist, at his restaurant, because Mazzig served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). 

Yekutiel’s campaign didn’t return a JTA request for comment; Yekutiel’s restaurant, Manny’s, has been targeted multiple times by antizionists in the past. 

“The person that you’re talking about, he was Israeli. I didn’t know that he was an IDF soldier,” he told the activist who confronted him in a video from the march. The activist responded, “Well, maybe having Israelis at the café isn’t a good idea because it’s an apartheid state committing a genocide.” 

Some local politicians jointly condemned the harassment of both Wiener and Yekutiel, linking their identities as Jews. 

“The harassment campaign against Jewish candidates @Scott_Wiener + Manny Yekutiel is gross and unacceptable,” Trevor Chandler, a member of the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee, wrote on X. Chandler added that the local Democratic group “condemns antisemitism”. 

The day after Wiener’s harassment, two different groups of LGBTQ+ Jews had contrasting receptions at a New York Pride march. 

One, Jewish Queer Youth, experienced a largely peaceful march; a second, fronted by Zioness, a more explicitly Zionist group, faced harassment. Another prominent Pride event, the NYC Dyke March, was staged on Saturday without many of its longtime Jewish participants, The Forward reported, after organisers stated for the second year in a row that antizionism was a core value of the event; many Jewish former Dyke March organisers split away to form their own group. 

Some Jewish LGBTQ+ leaders say the majority of such spaces remain welcoming. Krass, the Keshet president, said in her statement to JTA that “nearly every instance” of the “nearly 100 Pride events Keshet has organised this year” were “met almost entirely with celebration”. 

In a newsletter on Monday, Krass told Keshet’s followers that she was “appalled” by some of the reactions to Wiener’s harassment. 

“Some people are refusing to acknowledge that antisemitism played any role. Others are using this incident as an opportunity to project false, harmful generalisations onto the entire trans community,” Krass wrote. “I have even seen fellow Jews call for the Jewish community to abandon the LGBTQ+ community and our shared fight for equality. This is not the way.”