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O Cousin, Where Art Thou?
Episode 3 of BAD COUSINS has just been published. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, the web, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hello everyone!
It’s Matan here again. Just in time for that long night of the soul known as the winter holidays, we have a fresh new episode of BAD COUSINS for you. In this one we finally take a little step away from modern politics to get into what really interests us: Biblical exegesis.
Wait! Come back. It’s not what you think. First of all, these few chapters of Genesis pack in as much family drama as a whole seasonful of the xmas rom-coms you’re passing the time with these weeks. A child is born out of wedlock; rival love interests lock horns; a man tearfully disowns his son for vaguely sexual offenses; all with the repeated messy interventions of the Good Lord, who also hands out vast territories and numberless progeny with the generosity of a corporate-branded reality host.
But we’re not rolling around in this stuff just out of prurient frivolity (not that there’s anything wrong with that).
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. So we also get into the thick of it - 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?
In large parts of the world this season we’re in seems to have very little to do with religion, except the religion of consumerism of course. And yet Christmas still has that “Christ” in it, so in whatever depleted form these old dreams are still haunting our societies. It’s as good a time as any to get Biblical, we think. Hope you enjoy it.
Cousiningly yours,
Das BAD COUSINS Team
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We’re publishing this show in partnership with The Diasporist, an online, bilingual magazine of political criticism, cultural analysis, and new writing from in and outside of Germany.
Their ongoing series from the Rise & Fall of the BRD symposium is must-read stuff.
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