842: 51 Days
This American Life
10/06/24
•58m
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Chen Almog-Goldstein was kidnapped by Hamas along with her three youngest children on October 7, 2023. This week, she tells the story of their life as hostages in Gaza.
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- Prologue: The 251 hostages taken by Hamas a year ago have become a divisive symbol in Israel. Host Ira Glass talks about the father of one hostage, and what happened to him at a protest last week when he called for a hostage deal. (6 minutes)
- Part One: On this week’s show, we’re airing excerpts of interviews with former hostages produced by an Israeli podcast, Echad Bayom. In these interviews they describe, in a remarkably detailed and complicated way, what happened to them a year ago.
- Part Two: Chen’s story continues, with a description of what it was like to be hidden in a small apartment with her children and their captors. (6 minutes)
- Part Three: Chen talks about the complicated relationship between her family and the people holding them hostage. (6 minutes)
- Part Four: Chen describes hearing the Israeli news while in captivity, including one night when her own father was interviewed. (4 minutes)
- Part Five: Chen talks about what it was like to walk around the streets of Gaza in disguise and their eventual release, 51 days after they were taken from their home. (13 minutes)
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Previous Episode
553: Stuck in the Middle
September 29, 2024
•59m
People caught in limbo, using ingenuity and guile to try to get themselves out.
- Prologue: Rachel has two kids. Elias, age seven, is a vegetarian. Theo, age five, is not. But Elias wants Theo, and everyone else in the house, to be vegetarian too. So Rachel and her husband are in the middle of negotiating the desires of two very strong willed kids. (12 minutes)
- Act One: Sara Corbett's father-in-law Dick is 81. And he's become obsessed with a limbo most of us hate – the music he hears whenever he's on hold. (14 minutes)
- Act Two: Mark Oppenheimer reports on agunah in the Orthodox Jewish community. An agunah is a woman whose husband refuses to give her a divorce – in Hebrew it means "chained wife." If you're an Orthodox Jew, strictly following Jewish law, the only real way to get divorced is if your husband agrees to hand you a piece of paper called a get. Without the get, women who want out of their marriages can stay chained to their husbands for years. In New York, a couple of rabbis were recently accused of using violence to force men to give their wives a get. (17 minutes)
- Act Three: Brett Martin documents a previously unnoticed human phenomenon, one that involves airplanes, crying, and Reese Witherspoon. (11 minutes)
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Next Episode
843: A Little Bit of Power
October 13, 2024
•56m
So much of the fight for the presidency is coming down to battles for small slices of voters who can help throw swing states to one candidate or another. Abbas Alawieh, a leader in the Uncommitted movement, grapples with how to get his voters the thing they want.
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- Prologue: When you have some power, but not a lot, how do you wield it when you’re suddenly cast into the spotlight? (4 minutes)
- Act One: Zoe Chace and Ben Terris follow Abbas Alawieh as he fights to broker a deal at the DNC – a way to potentially satisfy the people who voted “Uncommitted” in the primaries as a protest vote against Biden’s handling of the war in Israel and Gaza. (33 minutes)
- Act Two: Three weeks after the Democratic National Convention, Abbas speaks at a tense community meeting in Michigan about the Uncommitted organizers’ general election recommendation and hears back from voters on how they feel about the Democratic nominee at this point. (15 minutes)
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