The Gate of Tears

BONUS EPISODE: Live Event Audio

This is the audio from our November 2025 launch event we held with LABA [https://www.instagram.com/lababerlin/] at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin.  You'll hear panelists Yael Attia and Muhammad Jabali talk with Matan, Ben, and producer Guli about the central consequences and critiques of the BAD COUSINS framework.  Follow us on instagram @KolloMedia [https://www.instagram.com/kollomedia/] and @the_diasporist [https://www.instagram.com/the_diasporist/?hl=en] Subscribe to the Kollo Media newsletter [https://kollomedia.beehiiv.com/subscribe] 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 [https://kollomedia.com/].

The Gate of Tears

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. Follow us on instagram @KolloMedia [https://www.instagram.com/kollomedia/] and @the_diasporist [https://www.instagram.com/the_diasporist/?hl=en] Subscribe to the Kollo Media newsletter [https://kollomedia.beehiiv.com/subscribe] 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 [https://kollomedia.com/].

BONUS EPISODE: The Purim War

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 [https://www.timesofisrael.com/what-is-the-biblical-holiday-of-purim-and-why-do-israelis-link-it-to-khameneis-death/] 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 [https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691138244/reckless-rites], 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. Follow us on instagram @KolloMedia [https://www.instagram.com/kollomedia/] and @the_diasporist [https://www.instagram.com/the_diasporist/?hl=en] Subscribe to the Kollo Media newsletter [https://kollomedia.beehiiv.com/subscribe] 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 [https://kollomedia.com/].

Cast out the Slave Woman!

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. Follow us on instagram @KolloMedia [https://www.instagram.com/kollomedia/] and @the_diasporist [https://www.instagram.com/the_diasporist/?hl=en] Subscribe to the Kollo Media newsletter [https://kollomedia.beehiiv.com/subscribe] 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 [https://kollomedia.com/].

Communities of Disagreement

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. Follow us on instagram @KolloMedia [https://www.instagram.com/kollomedia/] and @the_diasporist [https://www.instagram.com/the_diasporist/?hl=en] Subscribe to the Kollo Media newsletter [https://kollomedia.beehiiv.com/subscribe] 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 [https://kollomedia.com/].