Kalam Edgar Mannheimer

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 East. This first episode is free but coming Kalam Shorts will only be available for our Patreon supporters (subscribe via patreon.com/kalampodcast). Upcoming shorts will look at topics like Settler Colonialism, the Kuffieh and Zionism.
Included in the shorts is a literature guide for further study!
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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 implications for the broader movement to liberate Palestine. Sinan is an Associate Professor at NYU in New York City and was arrested by the NYPD for peacefully protesting.
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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 moment, she’s travelling the Western world, advocating for the Palestinian cause. 
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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 Palestinian citizen of Israel, masterfully portrays the hard truths and complexities of Israeli society.
This episode can be seen as a sequel to Episode 1 with Suad Amiry, as her novel talks about the very real disappearance of Palestinians during the 1948 Nakba.
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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 this episode to all the murdered poets of Gaza.
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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 against Israeli civilians. The renowned Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi laments this dark development in his book “The 100 Years’ War on Palestine”, describing how different Palestinian armed factions from Hamas to Fatah expressed their rivalry through a kind of competition in suicide bombings. Part of it was desperation, part of it was blind revenge against the Israeli population for the Israeli Occupation Forces’ heavy handed response to Palestinian protests - where thousands of Palestinians throwing rocks were gunned down down by Israeli soldiers.
It was always the case however, and still is, that far more Palestinians were killed than Israelis. During this uprising, Khalidi estimates that 4,916 Palestinians and 1,100 Israelis were killed.
Episode 5 of the Kalam podcast explores this difficult period, with the General Director of the Palestinian prisoner support organisation, Addameeer, Sahar Francis.
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