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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In this episode we are joined by a very special guest, historian of Islam Yusuf Tayara, to talk about how the Abraham story spun off into all kinds of intriguing directions in the centuries following the bible.

We start off with a mysterious prophecy from Isaiah in the Old Testament, which seems to rebuke the Arabs for lacking hospitality towards some unspecified wanderers in the desert. We then proceed to a Jewish interpretation of this prophecy in the Talmud, which puts us square into BAD COUSINS territory by specifying that the spurned guests of the Arabs were Jewish priests. Being inhospitable is always bad, but treating cousins this way, of course, is particularly heinous!

Our next stop is deeper in Arabia, with the rise of Islam and the place of Abraham in its holiest text, the Qur’an. Through Ishmael and his descendant, the Prophet Muhammad, Abraham is the genealogical father of Arabs/Muslims, but here we once again see him also playing another role: as a universal symbol of monotheism.

From here, the plot thickens with a really strange medieval Jewish legend, in which Abraham meddles in Ishmael’s marital life in a way that seems to also be a commentary on the growing rifts between Shiites and Sunnis within Islam!

We love all our podcast children, but this was an especially fun one. It gets dark at times, as usual for us, but we also really bonded with Yusuf over the political possibilities of turning the “community of disagreement” over Abraham’s legacy into a force for solidarity, justice and peace. In these dark times, we need stuff like that.

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"With my brother against my cousin, with my first cousin against my second cousin, with my second cousin against my third cousin..."

In episode 3 of BAD COUSINS, we go deeper into the question, Why are the Abraham Accords named after Abraham?

Because for all the peace and common understanding that politicians in Israel, the USA, and the UAE claim the Abraham Accords stand for, there's an awful lot of conflict, violence, and exclusion in the story of Abraham, Hagar, Sarah, Isaac, and Ishmael.

In this episode, Ben and Matan go through the Abraham story from the Hebrew Bible, analyzing the main characters and their actions. (BTW - Matan made a very helpful family chart that we put up on our website and Instagram.)

Then, Matan gets into the political anthropology of kinship with guest Naor Ben-Yehoyada. Why is it that thinking of Arabs and Jews as cousins - at first glance, a friendly gesture - seems only to perpetuate exclusion, exploitation and hostility? What does it matter that these cousins are of a particular kind - the patrilineal kind? And what kind of political work are these weird old stories doing in the present, in the Middle East and (as always) beyond?

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It's been five years since the signing of these Accords and Donald Trump still can't shut up about AHB-ra-hahm. Neither can we, but it's really not just us and Trump who are obsessed. To prove the point, we went into the world’s most heavily militarized religious theme park, also known as the Old City of Jerusalem and asked some locals - both Palestinian Arabs and Jewish Israelis - to explain to us why the Abraham Accords are named after Abraham.

As you would certainly expect if you’ve listened to Episode 1, Palestinians were extremely critical of the Accords while Israelis were mostly quite jazzed about them. But despite this clear disparity, everybody had the same answer to our main question: the accords are named after Abraham because he’s the grandfather of the Jews and the Arabs, which makes us cousins. Of course what that means is up for interpretation, but the basic identification was a constant.

All this wouldn’t be worth demonstrating if this podcast was in Arabic or Hebrew. But it’s in English and it’s pitched at a European and North American audience, for which this is far from obvious. As we also discuss in this episode, outside the Middle East, Abraham is usually understood in a very different way, not as a literal genealogical grandfather but as more of a symbolic progenitor, and not only of Judaism and Islam but also of Christianity.

So if you think you’re observing this drama of ancient, unfathomable familial hatreds from the outside, think again. You’re in it. With Ted Cruz and Tucker Carlson. Let that sink in.

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What are the Abraham Accords? There was a lot of hyperbole going around when they were signed in Washington DC in September 2020, and the dust hasn’t really settled since. What’s clear is that the promise of regional peace that the Accords were supposed to bring has not - to put it mildly - come to pass.

Rather the opposite, in fact. Everyone from Yahya Sinwar to Jordan Peterson seem to agree that it was the Abraham Accords, and particularly the threat that they would be extended to Saudi Arabia, that set off the Hamas attack of October 7th 2023. That attack led to Israel’s brutal destruction of Gaza, and though at this moment there’s a ceasefire - we pray it holds - the Middle East is very far from peace indeed, Donald Trump’s comments notwithstanding.

In this episode, Ben and Matan talk to political scientist Dana El-Kurd about what the Abraham Accords actually are, and why they are such a disaster for the Palestinians and ordinary people throughout the Arab world. She makes the point that the Abraham Accords formalize shared interests across the region, interests which oppose the Palestinians’ demand for national independence and the desire of people throughout the region for democratic self-rule.

Dana El Kurd is an assistant professor at the University of Richmond in the Department of Political Science, and a senior nonresident fellow at the Arab Center Washington. She specializes in Palestinian and Arab politics, particularly on topics related to mobilization, public opinion, and international intervention.

This is a new show and we need your help getting the word out about it! If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with your friends, neighbors and, it goes without saying, your cousins. That’s much more effective than liking us on various platforms, though that’s nice too.

You can also support us on Patreon - thank you!

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The first episode of BAD COUSINS will be released on 31 October 2025. Subscribe to the feed now so you'll be notified when it comes out.

Check out our website for more: badcousins.show/

BAD COUSINS is produced by Ben Schuman-Stoler, Matan Kaminer, and LABA fellow Guli Dolev-Hashiloni. It's published by Kollo Media in partnership with The Diasporist. Music and theme song by Adam Maor.

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