O Cousin, Where Art Thou?

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"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, violence, and exclusion in the story of Abraham, Hagar, Sarah, Isaac, and Ishmael.

In this episode, Ben and Matan go through the Abraham story from the Hebrew Bible, analyzing the main characters and their actions. (BTW - Matan made a very helpful family chart that we put up on our website and Instagram.) 

Then, Matan gets into 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?

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