Kalam

Are Edgar and Sam, the two white men behind Kalam, actually orientalists? Listen to find out! In this first instalment of Kalam Shorts, Middle Eastern scholar Samuel Carlshamre discusses Edward Said's seminal book Orientalism. What is it about, and what do his critics say? Kalam Shorts are 10-15 minute explainers of terminology important to understand when studying and learning about the Middle Ea...

Across the United States and increasingly in Western Europe, students are establishing encampments on university campuses. Encampments in solidarity with Palestine. Students want to protest against the ongoing war on Gaza and to demand that their institutions divest from Israel. In today's episode Iraqi writer, poet and literary scholar, Sinan Antoon, speaks to Edgar about this movement and its im...

The Palestinian-Egyptian journalist Youmna El Sayed was for many people the media face of the war on Gaza. Soon she found herself in the surreal position of reporting on the same calamities she was facing herself. She and her husband and children have been displaced several times and at times did not have enough food or water. She has since chosen to evacuate Gaza for the sake of her kids. At the...

What if all the Palestinians would disappear? Not in a figurative sense, or even through ethnic cleansing or genocide. What if they simply vanished out of thin air? What would that do to israeli society? This is the premise of the Palestinian author Ibtisam Azem’s Book of Disappearance, first published in Arabic in 2014.  It’s a truly fascinating read, and Ibtisam Azem, who grew up as a Pales...

It's been six months since the October 7 attack. Since then, over 33,000 Palestinians have been killed as a result of Israel's bombing campaign and ground invasion of Gaza, nearly 14,000 of whom are children. The renowned Gazan poet Mosab Abu Toha joins Edgar today for a discussion about what it means to grow up in what Masha Gessen likens to a Nazi concentration camp. We would like to dedicate th...

The Second Intifada (~2000-2008) came out of the failure of the Oslo Accords, the failure of the PLO to create a Palestinian state, the crippling of the Palestinian economy through Israeli restrictions and Israel’s increasingly aggressive and violent settler expansion and colonial oppression. In contrast to the First Intifada, the Second Intifada was marked by a series of bloody terrorist bombings...

In Late 1987 Palestine erupted. The Israeli occupation was closing in on 20 years and getting comfortable. But seemingly out of nowhere, a mass movement of protests, strikes and boycotts shook Israel and the world. For the first time, the West gained sympathy for Palestine, as images of heavily armed Israeli soldiers brutalising Palestinian women and children were broadcast on TV screens around th...

In June of 1967 Israel launched an attack against its immediate neighbours, the combined Arab armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan. In a flash it managed to dismantle Egypt's entire air force, and defeated the Arab forces in just six days. This led to the occupation of Egypt's Sinai peninsula, Syria's Golan Heights and the occupation of all Palestinian territories in the West Bank and Gaza. This is w...

In 1948 an estimated 750,000 Palestinians were displaced as Zionist militias paved the way for the establishment of the state of Israel. Many historians refer to this ethnic cleansing. For Palestinians, it is known as the Nakba, Arabic for catastrophe. In this episode, the renowned Palestinian author and architect, Suad Amiry , speaks to host Edgar Mannheimer about what the Nakba means to the Pale...

In the previous episode of the Kalam Podcast, Suad Amiry walked us through the horrors of the 1948 Nakba. In this episode we try to answer the question of who those early Zionists who carried out the Nakba were, and they were motivated by. And what exactly Israelis celebrate when they commemorate the Nakba as their Independence Day. The Israeli journalist and political dissident Gideon Levy joins...