This is Episode 6 of BAD COUSINS, the final episode of the season. As we’ve been promising from the very beginning, this is where we take some time to discuss more radical and even optimistic ways of reading the Abraham story.

For this purpose, we invited scholar Avi-Ram Tzoreff to join us for a conversation grounded in a very unusual text, As For Ishmael I Have Heard You by Rabbi Yosef Kaminer (no relation to Matan). With this ultra-orthodox Jewish author, we dare to imagine a State of Abraham open to all.

We reclaim a revolutionary, transformatory, even messianic future from the religious Zionists, whose Messiah enters town riding a tank, intent on destruction. Our Messiah - and this is a traditional position - rides the humble donkey, listens to the voices of the downtrodden, and rebuilds destroyed cities.

Central to this reading is the figure of Hagar, the Egyptian immigrant. What if instead of focusing on the conflict between Ishmael and Isaac, we set our sights on all the ways the tradition commands us to honor the stranger in the person of Hagar? What would the world look like if we lived out that holiness?

As the world gets crazier by the day, we’re looking for little points of light in the dark. Hopefully we’ve found some.

Looking forward, as always, to hearing your thoughts.

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This is a bonus episode with Ben and Matan that we recorded in response to the ongoing Iran War, which was launched a few days before the Jewish holiday of Purim.

As the first bombs were being dropped from American and Israeli warplanes, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a speech explicitly connecting the biblical story of Purim - a court drama in which Jews are threatened and then annihilate their enemy in Ancient Persia - with the attack on Iran.

Again, we're able to use the BAD COUSINS framework to analyze the ways that politicians use biblical and religious stories to explain, win support for, and push their own - often violent and chaotic - agendas.

Using the biblical sources and Elliot Horowitz's excellent 2008 book Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence, Matan connects the Abrahamic family to Haman, the antagonist of the Purim story, and explains the far-right Zionist perspective on Amalek, the vague enemy of all Jews.

Ben and Matan then discuss why the Purim story shouldn't be thrown out of the Jewish canon, despite the way it's used to justify so much violence, and find a few threads of hope and inspiration in the story and its characters.

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Episode 5 of BAD COUSINS is a little harrowing. We’ve seen all along how toxic this Abraham thing can be, but this time we get into quite a lot of the nastiness.

We start off by looking at how the Crusades took up an identification of Sarah when slaughtering Jewish and Muslim infidels, and then we talk about how nineteenth-century British Christians became enamored with the idea of bringing the Jews back to Zion.

Next we find ourselves face to face with a sort of Muslim Zionist, King Faisal, who offered to upgrade the Jews from cousins to brothers. This pissed a lot of other Arabs off, which brings us to discuss ways in which people in the modern region try to deny the kinship relation and/or the obligations it entails.

In the final section, we bring in literary and political theorist Liron Mor to talk about how the impossible Jewish/Arab dichotomy plays out in Israeli politics, paying particular attention to one song in a rock opera, Mami, in which a Middle Eastern Jewish heroine tries to convince Palestinian attackers to let her alone because “Isaac and Ishmael were brothers.” We also talk about the reading of Sarah as some sort of badass nationalist, and how little justice that does to the deeply patriarchal setting in which she acts.

It does get quite dark. But as we’ve been trying to say all along, the stakes are real. Come along and think it through together with us.

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Subscribe to the Kollo Media newsletter to get exclusive interviews, episodes, and info about BAD COUSINS - plus the rest of the Kollo Media podcast and audiobook catalogue, which you can see at kollomedia.com.