"No amount of water can wash away genocide" w/ Ophira Gamliel

At the time of this episode's release we are in the middle of a 10 day period of reflection and piety for the Jewish people. The window between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur is known as the 'High Holidays' to many. So, we at Seemingly Unrelated want to take this confluence of events where the High Holidays overlap with an extra 3rd episode of the show inside of a calendar month to put the spotlight on these holidays.

What are the High Holidays about? Why are they celebrated so much in the home and not at the temple? How did the Jews of the Malabar coast in South India and the Egyptian god Anubis help shape the meaning of the word "atonement" during these Holidays? What does it mean to atone anyway and how does the shifting nature of that word reflect a flexible Jewish identity spread over thousands of years and bound to no single region of the world? These are the questions we set out to answer on this extra episode as well as to ask what atonement means for the High Holidays of 2025.

To help guide us on our journey is our special guest and the person who will be leading the discussion while Andrew learns some new things, Dr. Ophira Gamliel. Ophira is a senior lecturer in religious studies at the University of Glasgow and author of Judaism in South India 849-1489: Relocating Malabar Jewry.

If you are listening to this before Oct 2, we also think you'll appreciate this screening of The Rose of Ioannina that is definitely worth checking out.

Bibliography:

“Eyal Weizman ← Forensic Architecture.” Accessed September 28, 2025. https://forensic-architecture.org/about/team/member/eyal-weizman.

Gamliel, Ophira. “Land Fetishism and Genocidal Iconoclasm.” Palestine/Israel Review, The Pennsylvania State University Press, September 2, 2025. https://eprints.gla.ac.uk/366001/.

Gamliel, Ophira. Matrilineal Jews or Slave Descendants? Halakhic Laws and Trade Alliances in Medieval Malabar. Edited by Mahmood Kooria. Amsterdam University Press, 2024. https://eprints.gla.ac.uk/287725/.

Google Arts & Culture. “A 13th-Century Manuscript Depicts an Eastern Muslim Boat from Maqamat al-Hariri.” Accessed September 28, 2025. https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/a-13th-century-manuscript-depicts-an-eastern-muslim-boat-from-maqamat-al-hariri/pwHrty-7mcYEsw.

Lambourn, Elizabeth A. “‘Things for the Cabin’: Inhabiting the Ocean.” Chapter. In Abraham’s Luggage: A Social Life of Things in the Medieval Indian Ocean World, 189–218. Asian Connections. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Seemingly Unrelated is a podcast all about exploring how everyday things connect to major movements in history, politics and culture.

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