BAD COUSINS

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). Wit...

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 Per...

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 ourse...

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...

"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, violen...

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 Ac...

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 pa...

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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