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With goblins, spellcasters and delis, board game makers are imagining new Jewish worlds
(JTA) — Running a not-so-Zagat-rated deli, dropping into a Chinese restaurant for Christmas Eve dinner and acting out a bat mitzvah that involves a vampire — for contemporary board game fans, those can be all in an evening’s play.
That’s because a crop of new games aims to merge Jewish ideas and experiences with the aesthetics and language of games such as Dungeons & Dragons. Dream Apart places players in a fantastical reimagining of a 19th-century shtetl, for example, while J.R. Goldberg’s God of Vengeance draws inspiration from the Yiddish play of the same name. In the games in Doikayt, a collection released in 2020, players can literally wrestle with God.
Known as tabletop role-playing games because they ask players to take on a character, these games and their creators imagine exciting new worlds, subvert classic tropes in fun and irreverent ways, and reinterpret Jewish history and identity.
Tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons and Call of Cthulhu have exploded in popularity over the past several years, with many — including at least one group of rabbis — picking up the Zoom-friendly hobby during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. But the new Jewish games aim to do more than just provide a diversion or even an escape.
“Depending on your family, depending on your synagogue, depending on your community, you may have gotten more or fewer options of what Jewishness could mean in your imagination,” said Lucian Kahn, who created a trilogy of humorous Jewish role-playing games.
“What some of these games are doing is opening that up and pointing to alternate possibilities of imagining Jewishness, not as a way of converting anyone to anything else, but just as a way of showing the tradition is enormous,” he added.
Kahn is the creator of If I Were a Lich, Man, a trilogy of humorous games whose name is a mashup between a “Fiddler on the Roof” song and an undead character, the lich, that frequently appears in fantasy fiction and games. In the title game, players are Jewish liches — spellcasters whose souls, in the lore of Dungeons & Dragons, are stored in phylacteries, the Greek word for tefillin used by Jews in prayer. Representing the four children of the Passover seder, they debate how their community should address the threat of encroaching holy knights.
In some cases, the association of Jews with monsters has given rise to charges of antisemitism — the goblins of “Harry Potter” offer a prime example. But Kahn said he sees Jewish-coded monsters, and queer-coded villains, as figures of resistance.
“There’s a long tradition of looking at the monster and seeing that the reason why these are monsters is because the people who have oppressive power have decided that these are going to be the enemies of the ‘good’ oppressive powers,” Kahn explained. “But if you don’t agree with their ideology, if you’re seeing yourself as being a member of a marginalized community and being in opposition to these oppressive powers, then you can look at the qualities assigned to these monsters and some of them are qualities that are good.”
For Kahn, Jewish-coded monster characters also provide more of an inspiration than the archetypes of more traditional games.
“Maybe somebody thinks they’re insulting me or insulting Jews,” he said. “My response is: I like vampires and liches and trolls and goblins and think they’re much more interesting than bland white muscular humans running through the fields with a cross on their chest hacking at the same things with a sword over and over again.”
Kahn’s outlook has resonated in the tabletop role-playing game community. In February, he and Hit Point Press launched a Kickstarter to fund production of If I Were a Lich, Man. The campaign smashed its $5,000 goal, raising $84,590, enough to hit one of the campaign’s stretch goals of funding a grant to support independent zines about tabletop role-playing games.
The successful campaign means that Kahn’s three games will go into production. In addition to the game about liches, the trilogy includes Same Bat Time, Same Bat Mitzvah, in which players act out a bat mitzvah where one guest has been turned into a vampire, and Grandma’s Drinking Song, inspired by how Kahn’s Jewish great-great grandmother and her children survived in 1920s New York City by working as bootleggers during Prohibition.
In Grandma’s Drinking Song, players write a drinking song together as they act out scenes. Kahn, the former singer/songwriter and guitarist for Brooklyn Jewish queercore folk-punk band Schmekel, wanted to carry over elements of music into this game.
A throughline in all three games is the power of creative resistance to authority — a narrative that Kahn said strikes him as particularly Jewish.
“There are all these stories in Jewish folklore that are really overtly about finding trickster-y or creative ways of fighting back against oppressive and unjust governmental regimes, evil kings, bad advisors,” Kahn said. “One of the first stories I ever heard in my life was the Purim story, so it’s very embedded in my mind as a part of Jewish consciousness, when evil rulers come to power and try to kill us all, we’re supposed to find these outside-the-box ways of preventing that from happening.”
For some Jewish creators, Jewish holidays are an explicit inspiration. Like many Jewish kids of the ‘80s and ‘90s, Max Fefer, a civil engineer by day and game designer by night, grew up loving the picture book “Herschel and the Hanukkah Goblins,” which remains a popular festive text. But as Fefer notes, goblins are often associated with antisemitic stereotypes. Fefer’s first Jewish game, Hanukkah Goblins, turns the story on its head — players interact as the jovial goblins, who are here not to destroy but to spread the spirit of Hanukkah to their goblin neighbors.
Last year, Fefer launched a successful Kickstarter for another Jewish holiday-inspired tabletop role-playing game, Esther and the Queens, where players assume the roles of Esther and her handmaidens from the Purim story, who join together to defeat Haman by infiltrating a masquerade party as queens from a far-off land.
Esther and the Queens channels Fefer’s Purim memories and includes carnival activities, including Skee-Ball; a calm, relaxing Mishloach Manot basket-making; and a fast-paced racing game.
“All of our holidays, they’re opportunities for us to gather as a community in different ways,” Fefer said. “Watching this satirical, comedic retelling of the story of Purim and the Esther Megillah and coming together into a theater, in a synagogue, to watch these spiels and laugh together and spin the graggers when we hear Haman’s name — all of those things help us build identity and community, and I think games in particular surrounding identity, that’s a great way for a Jewish person themselves to feel seen in a game and reinforce their identity, and share their background with friends.”
Another pair of Jewish game creators, Gabrielle Rabinowitz and her cousin, Ben Bisogno, were inspired by Passover.
“The seder is kind of like an RPG in that it’s a structured storytelling experience where everyone takes turns reading and telling, and there’s rituals and things you do at a certain time,” Rabinowitz said. “It’s halfway to an RPG.”
The game became a pandemic project for the two of them, and alongside artist Katrin Dirim and a host of other collaborators, they created Ma Nishtana: Why Is This Night Different? — a story game modeled on their family’s seder. The game follows the main beats of the Exodus story, and in every game, there will be a call to action from God, a moment of resistance, a departure and a final barrier — but different characters and moments resonate depending on the players’ choices.
As an educator at the Museum of Natural History, Rabinowitz said she is often thinking about how to foster participation and confidence, and she wanted to create a game-play mechanic to encourage players to be “as brazen as her family is.” The result was an in-game action called “Wait! Wait! Wait!” — if players wish to ask a question, make a suggestion, disagree with a course of action or share a new perspective, they can call out “Wait! Wait! Wait!” to do so.
The game also includes a series of scenes that are actively roleplayed or narrated, and each includes a ritual — one that can be done in-person or an alternate remote-friendly version. For example, at one point each player must come up with a plague inspired by the new story they’re telling together, and in the remote version, players go camera-off after reciting theirs.
“The fact that it was created during the pandemic and a way for us to connect and other people to connect with each other is really the soul of the game,” Rabinowitz said. “After each person tells a plague, by the end, all the cameras are off and everyone stays silent for another minute. It’s a hugely impactful moment when you’re playing remotely. The design is interwoven in the game itself.”
Rabinowitz said by playing a story of a family undergoing these trials, the themes of family and identity deepen every time she plays the game.
“A lot of people say, ‘Wow, I’ve never felt more connected to this story,’” she said. “Embodying these characters gave me a feeling of relevance and that makes it feel important as a Jewish precept.”
For other creators, that deep connection comes in more lighthearted scenarios. Nora Katz, a theatremaker, game designer and public historian working at the Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life (ISJL) by day, created the Jewish deli-centered game Lunch Rush, which was included in the Doikayt anthology.
“There’s also types of institutions that come up a lot in [tabletop role-playing games], especially sort of high fantasy,” she said. “Everyone meets in a tavern, there’s an inn, things like that. So the idea of a deli as a central gathering place in a world like that felt fun to me.”
An important element of Lunch Rush is that players must be eating while playing, so for Katz’s first round with friends, they got together with chocolate chip ice cream and dill pickle potato chips. She said the deli is a shared language, and her fellow players were all bringing in their own favorite things about delis they loved into the fictional place they were building together.
Tabletop role-playing games “at their core are about collaboration and relationships and storytelling and community, and for me, all of those things are also what Jewishness is about, to me they totally go hand in hand,” Katz said.
The games are not meant to be for Jewish players only. Rabinowitz said the guidebook for Ma Nishtana includes essays to encourage people to further engage with the narrative.
“Jewish players, non-Jewish players, priests, non-religious people, all different people have played it and almost all of them have told us it’s given them a new way of thinking of how they relate to religious tradition, and I didn’t really set out to do that,” Rabinowitz said. “I feel really privileged to have helped create that space.”
Rabinowitz and Bisogno also commissioned other creators to build alternate backdrops for their game, so it can be repurposed to telling the story of another oppressed people’s fight for freedom. Players can interact as embattled yaoguai, spirits from Chinese mythology; explore a Janelle Monáe-inspired Afrofuturist world; play as Indigenous land defenders; or unionize as exploited workers at “E-Shypt.”
Fefer, who has been amplifying the work of other Jewish creators in the tabletop role-playing game space, said the harm of stereotyping and reinforcing negative tropes is still present in the industry, and not just for Jewish people. For example, fans recently criticized Dungeons & Dragons publishers Wizards of the Coast for reinforcing anti-Black stereotypes in the descriptions of a fantasy race, the Hadozee.
“I think it’s a process of talking to people who are from these groups and bringing them onto your teams and making sure you’re incorporating their perspectives into, in the example of Dungeons & Dragons, a hundred-million-dollar industry, being intentional about that design and looking at things from lots of different angles,” Fefer said. “How could our branding, our games be reinforcing something we’re not even aware of?”
Fefer hopes people who play Hanukkah Goblins and Esther and the Queens feel seen and have moments of shared joy, and also that they learn something from these games — about the antisemitic tropes in fantasy, or about underrepresented groups within the Jewish community. With Esther and the Queens, Fefer collaborated with a writer and artist, Noraa Kaplan, to retell the Purim story from a queer and feminist lens, drawing on Jewish texts that the pair said shows the long presence of queer and trans people in Jewish tradition.
“We have a lot of richness within Judaism to share our culture and share our upbringing but also just be representation,” Fefer added. “We’re living in a time of heightened antisemitism and the world being a gross place to be at times, and we can really bring the beauty of Judaism into game design and create experiences for people that are both representative of Judaism and also just very Jewish experiences.”
But for all the important conversations and learning experiences that can come from Jewish tabletop role-playing games, Katz said the goofiness and joy is important, too.
“We live in such a horrendous society that is of our own making,” she said. “If you can, for a little while, enjoy an anticapitalist fictional deli that you and your friends live in, I think that’s great.”
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The post With goblins, spellcasters and delis, board game makers are imagining new Jewish worlds appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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California’s Gavin Newsom Proposes Budget Increase for State Universities Amid Federal Funding Threats
California Gov. Gavin Newsom in Sacramento, California, US, on Aug. 8, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Carlos Barria
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a rumored potential candidate for US president in 2028, has proposed hundreds of millions of dollars in new funds for state universities amid the Trump administration’s policy of canceling federal grants and contracts held by institutions which it accuses of failing to combat campus antisemitism.
Newsom previously sought to cut funding to the University of California (UC) and California State University (CSU) by 8 percent during the 2025-2025 fiscal year (FY), before dropping that figure to 3 percent. Then on Friday, the governor proposed a new budget which would increase next year’s appropriation by $350.6 million for UC and $365.7 million for CSU, raising the state’s general fund for the schools to $5.3 billion and $5.6 billion, respectively.
“The budget introduced today by Gov. Newsom continues to provide critical support for the university and our students,” UC president James B. Milliken said in a statement responding to the news. “State support is more important than ever, as we face tremendous financial pressures stemming from rising costs and unprecedented federal actions. UC campuses rely on funding stability to serve students and maintain the academic and research excellence that has made UC the world’s greatest research university.”
He added, “An investment in UC is an investment in California’s future. I look forward to our ongoing partnership with Gov. Newsom and the legislature to ensure that our students have what they need to succeed at UC and beyond.”
The move, even as it defers $129.7 million for UC and $143.8 million for CSU to a later date, gives the schools breathing room as they fear the Trump’s administration’s confiscation of funds. Last year, for example, the administration impounded $250 million from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
US President Donald Trump ordered the money canceled in August after determining that the school exposed Jewish students to discrimination by refusing to intervene when civil rights violations transpired or failing to correct a hostile environment after the fact. He ordered the move even after UCLA agreed to donate $2.33 million to a consortium of Jewish civil rights organizations to resolve an antisemitism complaint filed by three students and an employee.
UCLA was sued and excoriated by the public over its handling of a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” that an anti-Zionist student group established on campus in the final weeks of the 2024 spring semester. Witnesses said that it was a source of antisemitism from the moment it became active, and according to the lawsuits, students there chanted “death to the Jews,” set up illegal checkpoints through which no one could pass unless they denounced Israel, and ordered campus security assigned there by the university to ensure that no Jews entered it.
Many antisemitic incidents occurred at UCLA before the institution was ultimately sued and placed it in the crosshairs of the Trump administration.
Just five days after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, as previously reported by The Algemeiner, anti-Zionist protesters chanted “Itbah El Yahud” at Bruin Plaza, which means “slaughter the Jews” in Arabic. Other incidents included someone’s tearing a chapter page out of Philip Roth’s 2004 novel The Plot Against America, titled “Loudmouth Jew,” and leaving it outside the home of a UCLA faculty member, as well as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) staging a disturbing demonstration in which its members cudgeled a piñata, to which a picture of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s face was glued, while shouting “beat the Jew.”
On the same day that UCLA settled the suit, the US Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division ruled that UCLA’s response to antisemitic incidents constituted violations of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
“Our investigation into the University of California system has found concerning evidence of systemic antisemitism at UCLA that demands severe accountability from the institution,” Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a statement at the time. “This disgusting breach of civil rights against students will not stand: the [Department of Justice] will force UCLA to pay a heavy price for putting Jewish Americans at risk and continue our ongoing investigations into other campuses in the UC system.”
Newsom has positioned himself as an ally of higher education throughout its clash with Trump. In August, he demanded that Harvard University president Alan Garber resign rather than reach a deal with the Trump administration that would restore federal funding to Harvard in exchange for the school’s agreeing to conservative demands for addressing campus antisemitism and shuttering diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.
“You don’t work with Donald Trump — only FOR Donald Trump,” Newsom protested, writing on the X social media platform. “Looks like Harvard has chosen to surrender. Alan Garber must resign. An absolute failure of leadership that will have demonstrable impacts to higher education across our country. He should be ashamed.”
He added, “California will never bend the knee.”
Newsom had days earlier criticized Trump’s effort to combat antisemitism and reform higher education, denouncing it as “disgusting political extortion.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Ex-Yale Law School Professor Dismisses Iran Protests Over ‘Zionist’ Backing, Justifies Regime Oppression
Protesters march in downtown Tehran, Iran, Dec. 29, 2025. Photo: Screenshot
A former Yale University professor who was fired over her connection to a fundraising front for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a US-designated terrorist organization, has drawn scrutiny again for dismissing anti-regime protests in Iran due to “Zionist endorsement,” defending Tehran’s crackdown on dissent, and castigating US law enforcement.
“In the imperial countries, the police function as the domestic arm of the empire,” Helyeh Doutaghi wrote in an essay published by the far-left Progressive International on Jan. 6. “They suppress dissent, criminalize resistance, and enforce accumulation through violence particularly against Black, Indigenous, and other Peoples of Color.”
Doutaghi then claimed that law enforcement in New Haven, Connecticut, the location of Yale, is “trained by the Israeli military” and that “policing is inseparable from imperial colonial violence.”
In contrast, she argued, Iran’s “Law Enforcement Command,” notorious for atrocities such as killing a young woman who was in custody for not wearing a head covering in accordance with the country’s Islamic dress code, “exists within a radically difference context,” having faced “sustained attempts at regime change operations and color revolution tactics.”
Doutaghi appears to see Jewish maneuvering behind the Iranian people’s efforts to resist their government’s theocratic, authoritarian rule. She argued that the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests of 2022, which erupted in the wake of the regime’s killing of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, were commandeered by “Zionist endorsement, coordinated diasporic networks, and sustained media warfare” to achieve “regime change.”
The article came out as the Iranian regime began cracking down on a new round of anti-government protests with an unprecedented scale of violence, reportedly killing thousands of demonstrators over the past two weeks.
In a viral post, Paul Mason, contributing editor for The New World, said Doutaghi’s essay represents the “logic of decolonization’ theory,” in which, he added, “Western cops bad; Iranian cops good. Woman rights good — but not if it leads to revolution in Iran.”
Yale Law School (YLS) fired Doutaghi in March after independently verifying a report by Jewish Onliner which exposed her membership in Samidoun, which identifies itself as a “Palestinian prisoner solidarity network.”
Founded in 2011 in the Canadian province of British Columbia, Samidoun is a “front group” for the PFLP — which gained infamy in the 20th century for perpetrating a series of airplane hijackings — according to the US and Canadian governments. The US and Canada each imposed sanctions on Samidoun in October 2024, labeling the organization a “sham charity” and accusing it of fundraising for designated terrorist groups such as PFLP.
Samidoun also described the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel as “a brave and heroic operation.”
Yale noted that Doutaghi was publicly listed on Samidoun’s website as a member.
Doutaghi denounced the inculpatory facts uncovered by the university as “fabricated claims” and lodged counteraccusations which blamed her being outed on Zionists.
“Yale has engaged in bad faith throughout this ‘process,” she wrote in a statement posted on X after being placed on leave. “YLS’s singular concern with maintaining the approval of the Zionist backers who bankroll their complicity in genocide led the organization to pressure me into an interrogation that I had every reason to believe was designed not to uncover the truth, but to justify a predetermined outcome.”
She continued, “What is clear is that YLS actions constitute a blatant act of retaliation against Palestinian solidarity — a violation of my constitutional rights, free speech, academic freedom, and fundamental due process rights. I am being targeted for one reason alone: for speaking the truth about the genocide of the Palestinian people that Yale University is complicit in.”
Doutaghi is another example of the higher education establishment’s embrace of scholars who promote anti-Israel animus, an issue that is driving the campus antisemitism crisis, according to a recent survey conducted by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Academic Engagement Network (AEN).
Fifty percent of survey respondents said that anti-Zionist faculty have established de facto, or “shadow,” boycotts of Israel on campus even in the absence of formal declaration or recognition of one by the administration. Among those who reported the presence of such a boycott, 55 percent noted that departments avoid co-sponsoring events with Jewish or pro-Israel groups and 29.5 percent said this policy is also subtly enacted by sabotaging negotiations for partnerships with Israeli institutions. All the while, such faculty fostered an environment in which Jewish professors were “maligned, professionally isolated, and in severe cases, doxxed or harassed” as they assumed the right to determine for their Jewish colleagues what constitutes antisemitism.
Meanwhile, the faculty’s activism provided an academic pretext for the relentless wave of antisemitic incidents of discrimination and harassment which pro-Hamas activists perpetrated against Jewish and Israeli members of campus communities following the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, the groups said.
Another faculty source of campus antisemitism is the Faculty and Staff for Justice (FSJP) group.
FSJP is a spinoff of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a group with links to Islamist terrorist organizations. FSJP chapters have been cropping up at colleges since the Oct. 7 atrocities, and throughout the 2023-2024 academic year, its members, which include faculty employed by the most elite US colleges, fostered campus unrest, circulated antisemitic cartoons, and advocated severing ties with Israeli companies and institutions of higher education.
In September 2024, AMCHA Initiative, a higher education watchdog, published a study offering evidence that FSJP inspired antisemitic hate crimes, anti-Israel divestment measures, and the collapse of discipline and order on college campuses. Using data analysis, AMCHA found a correlation between a school’s hosting an FSJP chapter and anti-Zionist and antisemitic activity. For example, the researchers found that the presence of FSJP on college campuses increased by seven times “the likelihood of physical assaults and Jewish students” and increased by three times the chance that a Jewish student would be subject to threats of violence and death.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Anti-Israel Activist Cameron Kasky Drops US Congressional Bid in New York
Cameron Kasky, former US congressional candidate in New York’s 12th district. Photo: Screenshot
Cameron Kasky, a prominent Gen Z political activist and Parkland school shooting survivor, has withdrawn from the Democratic primary race to succeed US Rep. Jerry Nadler in New York’s 12th Congressional District, saying he plans to focus instead on human rights in the West Bank.
Kasky, 25, announced his decision on Tuesday in a social media post, ending a short-lived congressional bid that had drawn attention for its sharp criticism of Israel and its appeal to younger progressive voters. He said recent travel to the West Bank had influenced his decision to step away from electoral politics for now.
“Thank you to everyone who supported our human rights-centered campaign for New York’s 12th Congressional District,” Kasky posted on X.
“It’s the honor of my life to be walking out of this race with the chance to do what must be done,” he continued, adding that he intends to focus on documenting and opposing what he described as “settler violence” in the West Bank.
His exit marks the latest shake-up in the already crowded Democratic primary to represent one of Manhattan’s most reliably blue districts, which spans parts of the Upper East Side, Upper West Side, and Midtown. Nadler, who has represented the district for decades, announced his retirement last year, triggering a wide-open contest.
Kasky, who is Jewish and rose to national prominence as a co-founder of the March for Our Lives movement after surviving the 2018 Parkland shooting, entered the race late last year with a platform centered on gun reform, progressive domestic policies, and a call to halt US military aid to Israel. He had repeatedly accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, a position that set him apart from much of the Democratic establishment in New York.
Kasky has also accused Israeli leaders of advancing the war in Gaza in service of the “Greater Israel” agenda — a fallacious conspiracy theory which claims that Israel seeks to expand its borders into the Sinai Peninsula, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Iraq.
Such views drew praise from some younger activists but also criticism from pro-Israel groups and Democratic leaders in the district, where support for the Jewish state has historically been strong.
During his short-lived campaign Kasky notably vowed to vote against all aid to Israel, including aid to furnish the Iron Dome missile interception system.
With Kasky’s departure, the field remains packed with well-known figures, including New York State Assembly members Micah Lasher and Alex Bores, journalist and former cable news anchor Jami Floyd, and Jack Schlossberg, the grandson of former President John F. Kennedy. Conservative lawyer George Conway, a longtime critic of US President Donald Trump, is also running as a Democrat.
Political analysts have said Kasky was unlikely to emerge as a frontrunner in a district dominated by older, highly engaged voters, but his candidacy reflected broader generational and ideological tensions within the Democratic Party, particularly over US policy toward Israel.
His withdrawal removes one of the race’s most outspoken critics of Israeli government policy, potentially narrowing the ideological range of the debate as the primary campaign accelerates.
The Democratic primary is scheduled for June, with the winner heavily favored to hold the seat in November.