Rachel “Archie” Matlow spent years feeling more at home in Toronto’s queer, progressive left than in organized Jewish life. They’re trans, didn’t fit in at Jewish summer camp, and ultimately found refuge among their fellow left-wing creatives, podcasters and journalists. But after Oct. 7, 2023, things started to change. Years of confusion, soul-searching, political research and social isolation led them to write an expansive essay in the Globe and Mail in September 2026, titled, “Jew-hatred has never stopped evolving. Antizionism is its latest iteration”.

Appearing on The Jewish Angle with Phoebe Maltz Bovy, Matlow explains that, starting after Oct. 7, they began recognizing forms of antisemitism they had not previously known how to name—why wasn’t “Jewish” an identity option on arts grants?—which seemed conspicuous in spaces that considered themselves anti-racist. But the more Matlow would try and engage their friends in conversation, the more they were shut down: they had “work” they needed to do, or their media diet was skewing too right-wing, or they were suddenly “problematic”. For a group that loves to break the gender binary, they joke, when it comes to Israel-Palestine, morality is completely binary.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Hi, this is Phoebe Maltz Bovy and you’re listening to The Jewish Angle, a podcast from The Canadian Jewish News. Please subscribe to The Jewish Angle on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts, perhaps at the local market.

When I first saw news reports of a Belleville, Ontario synagogue shooting, I thought, well, here we are again. I was upset, of course, but I wasn’t able to muster surprise because such things are unfortunately not surprising.

Nor was I able to get worked up wondering what the motivation would turn out to be this time, whether we would be looking at a left-wing, right-wing, or merely unhinged anti synagogue individual. I had just that usual thought about how Jews are prey, and there’s this cross-ideological consensus that we’re the problem, shared by people with widely divergent ideas of what ails society at this point in time. I logged onto the social media platform Bluesky, the supposed Twitter without Nazis, and even though I follow plenty of Canadians, Canadians who are pretty, you know, up on the media, reading the news, I did not see much interest in this story. I also wasn’t posting about it myself because I felt like what was even there to say at this point.

It was hard, you can’t really read anything into absence of posting. I couldn’t know whether this was people afraid of seeming pro-Israel if they said anything, or if this was people who like me were just kind of thinking, well, that’s where we are now. And yeah, anyway, so I was despairing, despairing a little bit. I this all was happening.

I was because I am not an observant Jew. I was in Fresca Pizza in Toronto, pizza by the slice, near the University of Toronto campus, sitting under one of those news chyron type things, the ticker going explaining about the synagogue shooting, feeling a lot of complicated emotions, feeling guilty, not that I was eating on Yom Kippur because I am not observant and am bothered about this, but feeling guilty that I was not where Jews. Were being attacked, I felt like I was doing something wrong. I’ve had complicated feelings, didn’t really know what to do with these feelings, other than to have Archie Matlow on the podcast.

Archie’s Globe and Mail op-ed, published on September 11th, Sept. 11, 2026, Not the September 11th. It’s called “Jew-Hatred Has Never Stopped Evolving. Anti-Zionism Is Its Latest Iteration.” Archie’s op-ed brilliantly and sensitively explores topics that will to some extent be familiar to listeners of this podcast. And I’m speaking with them less than a week after the attack. So first of all, Archie, welcome to The Jewish Angle.

Archie Matlow: Thank you, Phoebe. It’s great to be here.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: So my first question about this op-ed and I have so many is, How did it come into being?

Archie Matlow: Well basically I’ve been working on it for almost three years. It’s just been part of my process to figure out, how did my world turned upside down. So I’ve just been reading and thinking and writing and taking notes and more reading and thinking and arguing and—basically, I have hundreds of pages written. The biggest challenge was, okay, how can I say something in even fewer than 5,000 words? Because it’s so complicated. And you can’t just explain one piece of the puzzle without—you need to explain the architecture. And so the biggest challenge, I guess the past couple months, when I decided, okay, I want to start with an op-ed, was trying to just be able to explain, you know, just scratch the surface in 4,200 words.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Yes. Well, so first of all, what I should have started with is who are you in the world? Like what is your job? What your line of work, approximately. I’m not, you know, looking at anybody’s exact birth date, but like, you know, the these sorts of things.

Archie Matlow: I’m from Toronto. I guess categories that would describe me, I don’t know anymore, but you know, like queer, trans, trans masculine, feminist. So I come from definitely the progressive left queer community. I’ve always connected with it more than any sort of organized Jewish life. I never felt connected to it.

If anything, like I rebelled against it growing up. I quit Sunday school, I don’t know, when I was 10, and declared myself an atheist. I was sent to camp for a couple of years and I I hated it. A Jewish summer camp.

So being Jewish just wasn’t cool. Like I didn’t connect with the other Jewish kids in my neighbourhood really. But that changed as I got older. I went to a small liberal arts university and met other alternative Jews there in the queer community and discovered more New York. Writers and comedians. And then I was like, that’s what I am. I’m a Larry David Jew.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: There are dozens of us. Far more than dozens.

Archie Matlow: Started to embrace it, but still I never went to a Jewish group of any sort. The community I was still primarily in was left-wing queer. I work in media. I used to work at the CBC and I work in podcasting.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: There’s a there’s a part of your op-ed that I want to read and then talk about. You write, “For a long time I struggled to name what I was seeing. It didn’t look like the antisemitism I’d learned to recognize. For starters, it was coming from the left, the ‘good guys.’” End quote from your article.

So I was just wondering whether you had any sense prior to Oct. 7 Of things being like that, because we are Definitely you and I coming at this topic from different, I guess, I don’t know if ideological places or just sort of it type of interest places, because I definitely before Oct. 7, I was never part of a left-wing scene. And it was not surprising for me that there would be left antisemitism. What was surprising was antisemitism becoming this kind of organizing principle across ideology. Was it more that it was shocking like to experience it in interpersonal type situations, or were you just like it you did not know there was left antisemitism?

Archie Matlow: No, I really didn’t know. No. Like I suspected people, you know, hold unconscious anti-Jewish beliefs. But I didn’t I didn’t know about, for example, the history of........

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