Pride and Prejudice: How Antisemitism Captured LGBTQ+ Spaces | With Eve Barlow
It's Pride Month, and at a queer women's sauna night in Barcelona, two married Jewish women — wearing Stars of David — were surrounded, interrogated, and thrown out to chants of "Free Palestine." Not in Tehran. Not in Gaza. In a room built on the promise that no one gets turned away for who they are.
Journalist Eve Barlow knows these spaces from the inside. She was deputy editor of NME — the biggest weekly music magazine in the world — broke bands, wrote the cover stories, and built LGBTQ+ coverage from scratch at GQ. She was at the beating heart of progressive culture. Then, around 2019, she said one thing out loud: that the anti-Zionism rising around her was antisemitism wearing a new coat. The world that let her in turned on her. She named her newsletter after what they did to her — Blacklisted.
In this conversation, Eve and host Ben Chertoff go past the headlines on:
- The Barcelona sauna incident — and why the perpetrators were elites (a university sociologist, a lawyer, a teacher), not the ignorant
- Where "Queers for Palestine" actually comes from — the queer-theory and post-colonial lineage that turned a civil-rights movement into an oppressor/oppressed morality play
- Why marginalization became a political identity the movement can't put down — and the eerie parallel to how Jews went from "oppressed" to "oppressor"
- The "as-a-Jew" anti-Zionists — Matt Bernstein, Zach Polanski — and the market that rewards them
- The pinkwashing smear, flipped on its head: Israel's real LGBTQ+ record vs. the rest of the region
- Released hostage Emily Damari, and the particular vulnerability of being openly gay in captivity
- And a closing message to the queer Jewish kid who's been told to choose between their people and their pride
Eve's argument: Pride began as a celebration of how far people had come in a single generation. Somewhere along the way it inverted — from celebrating victory into a contest over who is most oppressed. The moment a people succeeds, it gets recast as the oppressor. Her answer isn't to shrink. It's to refuse the trade.
Eve Barlow's links
- 📰 Blacklisted (Substack): https://evebarlow.substack.com
- ✍️ "Queers for Zion" (SAPIR Journal): https://sapirjournal.org/aspiration-ii/2026/queers-for-zion/
- 𝕏 https://x.com/Eve_Barlow
- 📸 Instagram: https://instagram.com/evebarlow
Chapters
- (00:00) Cold open
- (00:18) Welcome — who is Eve Barlow
- (02:08) The Barcelona sauna incident
- (06:52) An outlier, or an epidemic?
- (11:34) From NME and GQ to fighting Jew-hatred
- (20:35) The writing on the wall: BDS, London, and leaving the UK
- (28:09) Where "Queers for Palestine" comes from: queer theory & post-colonialism
- (35:36) Marginalization as political pathology
- (42:26) Moral superiority and the activist "cult"
- (48:22) Building a new closet: "take off your Magen David"
- (52:42) The "as-a-Jew" anti-Zionists: Matt Bernstein & Zach Polanski
- (57:19) Pinkwashing — and Israel's real LGBTQ+ record
- (1:02:17) Most rights in the region — and still room to grow
- (1:04:13) "Queers for Zion" and Emily Damari in captivity
- (1:08:52) To the queer Jewish kid told to choose
- (1:12:04) Where to find Eve's work
- (1:12:41) Ben's final reflection
The Honest Take goes past the headlines to find out what's actually true about Israel and the people covering it. Hosted by Ben Chertoff for HonestReporting.
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