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Bad Cousins, Season 1
An interview with Matan Kaminer and Ben Schuman-Stoler
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The Abraham Accords have been in the news a lot these days. Signed in 2020 between Israel and a number of Arab states and hailed as a landmark step toward peace in the Middle East, they have instead become a fault line in the midst of the very conflict they claimed to prevent.
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Why were the Abraham Accords named for Abraham? And what can the story of Abraham tell us about the state of the Middle East today?
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These are some of the questions behind Bad Cousins, a podcast produced by Kollo Media in partnership with the Diasporist. Hosted by Ben Schuman-Stoler and Matan Kaminer, and supported by research from Guli Dolev-Hashiloni, the podcast takes an unusual approach to the Abraham accords, drawing upon theology, anthropological theory, and pop culture to untangle the scriptural myth used to justify them.
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Last week, Bad Cousins released “The Gates of Tears,” the final episode of the season. With the help of the scholar Avi-Ram Tzoreff, Ben and Matan dig into the figure of Hagar, considering how the lesson of honoring the stranger could lead to a State of Abraham open for all.
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To mark the end of the first season, Diasporist intern Hugh Kane spoke with Ben and Matan about the series. The three discussed the origin of the project and how it has changed with the intensification of conflict over the past year.
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You can listen to all six episodes (as well as a special episode on the framing of Israel’s war with Iran and the audio from their launch event) on our website now. If you enjoy the podcast, please consider making a donation to the Diasporist or to Kollo Media. Your support allows independent media to keep producing stories like this one.
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Hugh Kane (HK): To me, Bad Cousins is an incredible combination of a stylistically innovative form and also a fun approach to a topic that has an incredible weight. It's organized as political commentary meets exegesis meets peer-reviewed paper, and has a guest list to fit that bill. Matan, I understand that this all stems from a paper you wrote, so let's start there. How did you decide to work on the Abraham accords as a topic? And how did you come up with the approach?
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Matan Kaminer (MK): Doing this deep dive into religion was new for me, and in some ways, it developed out of non-academic interest. I've been researching labor migration for more than ten years now, but this was essentially a personal project. When the Abraham accords first appeared, I had a very bad feeling which I could justify in economic and political terms. But there was also something that troubled me about the fact that they were named after Abraham. This became a kind of obsession. So I started reading up on it and discussing it with friends who study religion and kinship. This article blossomed out of that.
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Ben Schuman-Stoler (BSS): For the podcast, we started with the framing of: how does a peace deal lead to so much violence? The Abraham Accords were heralded as a peace deal that's supposed to lead to peace in the Middle East, and yet there is a genocide going on and conflagrations all over the region. So it seemed a bit ridiculous to be celebrating the Abraham accords as this great geopolitical success the way it has been in a lot of circles, even across political party lines, when, clearly, it's not a peace deal. That's also why we wanted to begin the series with a Palestinian perspective, to make clear why some never saw it as a peace deal in the first episode.
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HK: So part of the approach of Bad Cousins is to watch how a sense of monotheistic solidarity is used as political cover for the Abraham Accords. You then follow the consequences, intended and not, of that rhetoric to the point of its total failure. A lot has changed since you started the project, so, tell me, what’s surprised you most or been the most important question you encountered along the way? And how has the show evolved along with geopolitical developments?
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MK: When I wrote the article, I was very pessimistic about what I called the “Abrahamic Ideology” — this idea of Abraham as a benevolent patriarch, which I found to be hypocritical. But after I wrote the paper, I got exposed to a lot of thinking about Abraham that is more progressive, or even subversive.
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We get into this mostly in the last episode, but one alternative to this hegemonic ideology is a utopian or messianic vision for what Rabbi Joseph Kaminer calls the state of Abraham, a political formation that does not privilege a language, nation, people, or religion, but rather sees everyone as equal in the sight of God, and more importantly, as no one having an irrevocable right to any piece of land. Abraham represents the commandment to treat so-called strangers with respect to their rights and their position in the world, not only out of ethics but also as a political imperative. That's very meaningful. We mostly explore it from the Jewish point of view, but I think there are fruitful visions of this from other Abrahamic traditions, and from non-Abrahamic traditions as well.
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BSS: The core criticism of the show, and I think the question we have to answer, is “why mess around with myths when bombs are dropping?” But surprisingly this became more straightforward over the six months we published the show, as we started to see more examples of Trump cabinet members invoking Crusader slogans, or Netanyahu referring to the Purim story, or the Pope getting involved, seeking an alliance with the Muslims in an amazing twist. It's hard to not see the Bad Cousins in it all. Maybe I was also surprised how I became more and more persuaded by Matan’s arguments as the episodes went on. My role in the show is to represent the audience and as the episodes went on, it was easier for me to follow and understand the urgency of this kind of analysis and framework.
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Over the past few years, Matan has written some pieces that are really important about the history of the Jewish left beyond Zionism. And I think Bad Cousins gets at reclaiming Jewish history. What I mean is that we don’t simply allow the Abrahamic system narrative — which essentially contends that the history of the world and the history of the Jews has led to the point that Israel, on behalf of the Jews and Jewish history, should be bombing Iran and Lebanon and Gaza and anyone they want right now.
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We do a lot in the show to argue that this isn’t an inevitable result of Jewish tradition. Thousands of years of complex societies have looked nothing like this Abraham Accords idea, where Jews have Judea and Arabs have Arabia, and Palestinians essentially don’t exist, and every nation stays in their own borders. It’s a dark vision.
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HK: Talk to me a little about the actual mechanics of the podcast. You speak to political experts, academics, religious authorities, and people on the street. How did you decide on whom to speak to?
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MK: Our guests on the show are not just experts but friends as well. Three are also comrades of mine in Academia for Equality. The only guest I didn't know before was Dana El-Kurd, who plays an important role in the first episode. I don’t want to put words in her mouth, but I think she agreed to appear on the show not because she was convinced by the sort of theological argument, but because she saw where we're coming from politically.
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BSS: I should also say a word about the music. The idea was to avoid any orientalizing “Welcome to the Middle East” kind of thing and to use musical form to highlight the overlapping dynamics of the ideas in the show. Adam Maor composed the micro-tonal, micro-rhythmic, goat-bleating theme song, using all sorts of electronic and hand played instruments.
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MK: To be clear, no goats were harmed in the making.
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HK: I'll put that as a disclaimer at the bottom.
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BSS: That aspect of the music helps set the tone for the frantic, hectic style that we wanted to get across, something that includes being able to laugh at ourselves, being able to poke fun at the tragicomedy of 2000 years of this stuff. We should be able to be part of the story even as we're commenting on it.
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HK: One last question: In the final episode, you end, without spoiling anything, with a mix of cautious progressive optimism and the contemporary resonance of the messianic tradition — a fitting and innovative way of taking on an ever-increasing sense of doom in the world. Are you interested in taking this kind of angle of analysis to another topic? If so, what’s next?
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BSS: For one thing, we want the genocide and wars to stop immediately. And political solutions there have been obviously unsuccessful. So I'm really interested in seeking coalitions, and using our imaginations and even hearts to find strange and unexpected ones. With Joseph Kaminer, for example, if you had told me six months ago that one way to think about this that's really useful would come from a rabbi working on the Haredi Wikipedia I would have been really surprised.
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I've also been thinking a lot about figures of the far right all over the world and what they have in common, from Farage’s Reform to the AfD to people in America and elsewhere. I would love to run a massive list of those people through the Bad Cousins filter and see what comes out.
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MK: I think it’s clear to both of us that there’s plenty more. For the bonus episode about the Iran war, we went to a different part of the Bible, to Esther, because that was pertinent to the moment. So I'm sure we could do a lot more with that. And there's a lot more to be done with the Islamic Christian traditions.
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In the last episode, we get into something that is really important to talk about. As you mentioned, the world right now is a scary, negative place. For me, the definition of Messianism as the conviction that a thorough transformation of the world has to occur, and the desire for that transformation, is a very salient one. I want to think about how left-wing versions of this Messianism can be thought through and differentiated, in ritual and cultural forms.
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In the final episode of the season, Bad Cousins 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.
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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.
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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?
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