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Could a video game help combat antisemitism on college campuses?
At a time of escalating antisemitism in the online gaming community, Julia Sebastien’s upcoming PC game, StrangeLand, which explores the difficulties of Jewish life at an Ivy League college, offers an alternative: the digital game not as an agent of antisemitism, but as a bulwark against it.
“What I want players to experience with this game,” Sebastien told me over Zoom, “is the sequence of choices and trade-offs a Jewish student in a really rigorous institution has to make.”
Yet she also has a longer-term, and perhaps loftier, aim for StrangeLand: That college educators and administrators use it as a guide of sorts to Jewish student life in general, and in particular, to “antisemitism on campuses,” she said.
Still, its target audience is one you might expect — current and former Jewish students at North American colleges, who, Sebastien believes, need help communicating “to family and friends when they’re feeling too tired or burnt out by everything that’s been going on.”
Sebastien has made digital games before. Indeed, she’s had a couple, both also academic in tone, published in digital journals. (One explored the effects of burnout in academia.) But thanks to a grant from the nonprofit Maimonides Fund, StrangeLand is her most ambitious, well-funded effort yet.
It’s also a little more personal.
Sebastien grew up in what she described as a “pretty religious Jewish suburb,” a modern orthodox community in Toronto. She attended Jewish day school and was fluent in Hebrew. But she never really took to prayer, she told me, and even as a teenager she had begun to see her Jewishness as an intellectual pursuit more so than a religious one.
She stayed in Toronto for her BA at York University, but then ventured south to Cambridge, Mass., where in 2022 she got a Master’s in Learning, Design, and Technology from Harvard, before starting a PhD in media psychology at Cornell (she’s partway through).
StrangeLand is loosely based on her own experiences in the academy, though it also comprises anecdotes from dozens of other Jewish undergraduates, graduates and alumni, whom Sebastien consulted via a survey. Players will “inhabit the life of a Jewish student who has just left home to start graduate school at an Ivy League university, sometime in the 2010s,” she said. There, they’ll be presented with a series of scenarios, organized thematically.
These scenarios will be “evergreen” Jewish student dilemmas: negotiating obligations around Jewish holidays alongside the traditional academic calendar; staying late at a laboratory on a Friday night versus leaving to meet other Jewish students for Shabbat dinner. And some will have a grain of antisemitism, at least according to Sebastien: how to respond to an off-color remark in a social setting, say, or whether or not to wear a Magen David necklace in public.
There’s no winning or losing, per se. Rather, StrangeLand will aim to illustrate the “impossibility of satisfying the demands of these two worlds; that, really, is the crux of the gameplay,” Sebastien said.
Notably absent from StrangeLand, however, are Zionism and Israel, the very topics that have elevated the Jewish collegiate experience to something of a national issue. Their omission is no accident. “I’m not trying to shine a light on what’s happening now,” Sebastien said. “I’m trying to educate people about antisemitism.”
And to include such divisive subjects wouldn’t help Sebastien fulfill this aim, she feels. “As a designer, I need to consider the very real possibility that for some players, StrangeLand might be their first exposure to antisemitism as a distinct concept,” she said. “And I feel that the best way to bring antisemitism awareness to diverse audiences is to use examples that are clear, universal, and evergreen.”
These hot-button issues, moreover, would seriously upset the vibe Sebastien is going for. “I actually don’t want characters in the game shouting horrific things,” she said. “I don’t want to jar the player. I want to explore concepts in a safe way that can still be emotionally poignant and meaningful and educational.”
The game will have a retro feel, then, a lo-fi aesthetic — the heavily-pixelated, Game Boy-style gameplay that Sebastien adored as a child — which she’s confident will reinforce these feelings of comfort and safety. (She cited Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin’s best-selling 2022 novel about a pair of Jewish, Harvard-educated video game developers in the ‘90s, as one of the game’s inspirations.)
In short, Sebastien wants StrangeLand to be a respite from the pressures of campus life, while at the same time illuminating, especially for those non-Jewish players, the complexities of the Jewish student experience.
How it can accomplish this without meaningfully discussing Zionism is an open question. To my mind, StrangeLand seems to be as much a work of history as anything else. The antisemitism Sebastien repeatedly referenced during our conversation was of the classical U.S. variety, the WASP-y strain of the 1960s and 1970s often found in Roth and Bellow novels. Nowadays, of course, discussions about campus antisemitism are typically focused on something else entirely. So it’s a little hard to square Sebastien’s broader goal for StrangeLand, that it eventually be part of DEI curricula, with its lack of contemporary examples.
But Sebastien is confident players will leave StrangeLand with a more complete understanding of Jewish student life. “I want this to speak to and for Jewish students now and in the past,” she said. “That’s what this game is to me.”
The post Could a video game help combat antisemitism on college campuses? appeared first on The Forward.
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Iran Accuses US of Ground Assault Plans as Pakistan Hosts Regional Talks
Foreign Ministers Badr Abdelatty of Egypt, Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud of Saudi Arabia, Ishaq Dar of Pakistan and Hakan Fidan of Turkey pose for a group photo during their meeting to discuss regional de-escalation, amid the U.S.-Israel conflict with Iran, in Islamabad, Pakistan, March 29, 2026. Photo: Muammer Tan/Turkish Foreign MinistryHandout via REUTERS
Iran said it was ready to respond to any US ground attack, accusing Washington of preparing a land assault while seeking talks, as regional powers met in Pakistan on Sunday to try to bring the two sides together.
The initial discussions in Islamabad with Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt focused on proposals to reopen the Strait of Hormuz to shipping, sources familiar with the matter said. More talks will be held on Monday.
Iran’s effective blockade of oil and gas shipments through the strait since the US and Israel began attacking the country on February 28 is spreading economic pain around the world. Food and energy security and supply chains were among issues discussed in Pakistan, Egypt’s foreign ministry said.
As the conflict entered its second month, Israel‘s military said it had launched over 140 air strikes on central and western Iran, including Tehran, over the 24 hours to Sunday evening, hitting ballistic missile launch sites and storage facilities, among other targets.
A chemical plant in southern Israel near the city of Beer Sheva was hit by a missile or missile debris as Israel fended off multiple salvos from Iran, prompting official warnings to the public to stay away due to “hazardous materials.”
Another missile hit open ground near homes in Beer Sheva, located near several military bases, injuring 11 people.
The war has killed thousands of people and affected countries across the Middle East, with major aluminum plants in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates damaged by air strikes over the weekend.
The UAE, which has faced more Iranian missile and drone attacks than any other country, is seeking reparations from Iran for attacks on civilians and vital facilities and clear guarantees to prevent any repetition, an adviser to the president said.
Pakistan has offered to host peace talks, but the United States, Israel and Iran have set out maximalist positions to end the warfare, complicating the path to a solution.
Iran’s parliament speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf accused the US of sending messages about possible negotiations while at the same time planning to send in troops, adding that Tehran was ready to respond if US soldiers were deployed.
“As long as the Americans seek Iran’s surrender, our response is that we will never accept humiliation,” he said in a message to the nation.
Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthis joined the conflict on Saturday launching their first attacks on Israel and raising the prospect they could target and thus block a second key shipping route, the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. Analysts say renewed attacks there would pile further pressure on the world economy.
US MARINES START ARRIVING IN MIDDLE EAST
Washington has dispatched thousands of Marines to the Middle East, with the first of two contingents arriving on Friday aboard an amphibious assault ship, the U.S. military has said.
The Washington Post quoted US officials as saying the Pentagon was preparing for weeks of ground operations in Iran, adding that it was not yet clear if President Donald Trump would approve such plans.
Reuters has reported that the Pentagon has considered military options that could include ground forces.
Trump faces a stark choice between seeking a negotiated exit or escalating militarily that risks a protracted crisis, and would likely weigh further on his already low approval ratings.
“President Trump has poor options all around to end the war,” said Jonathan Panikoff, former US deputy national intelligence officer for the Middle East.
“Part of the challenge is the lack of clarity related to what a satisfactory outcome would be,” Panikoff added.
Washington said last week it had offered a 15-point ceasefire plan, with a proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and restrict Iran’s nuclear program, but Tehran has rejected the list and put forward proposals of its own.
ISRAEL HITS DOZENS OF TARGETS ACROSS IRAN
An Israeli official said Israel would continue carrying out strikes against Iran on what were described as military targets, adding there was no intention to scale back the campaign ahead of any possible talks between Washington and Tehran.
A building housing Qatar’s Al-Araby TV in Tehran was hit on Sunday, the semi-official Mehr news agency reported, with video showing walls and windows blown out of the multi-storey block.
“The missile hit. The ceiling and everything fell on our heads. Unfortunately, we couldn’t continue to work. It was a real miracle we survived,” said Al Araby camera operator Mohammadreza Shademan. “There was no military target here.”
With US midterm elections due in November, the increasingly unpopular war has weighed on Trump’s Republican Party. Demonstrators took to city streets across the US on Saturday in protests against the conflict.
Trump has threatened to hit power stations and other energy infrastructure if Iran does not open the Strait of Hormuz, though he has extended a deadline by 10 days through April 6.
A European diplomat warned that any further military escalation could make it harder to bring the two sides together, potentially delaying the possibility by weeks, if not longer.
Iranian threats against ships have kept most oil tankers from attempting the waterway. Iran has agreed to let an additional 20 Pakistani-flagged vessels pass through the strait, with two ships permitted to transit daily, Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar has said, calling it a “harbinger of peace.”
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Pentagon Preparing for Weeks of Ground Operations in Iran
US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth holds a briefing with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine, amid the US-Israeli war on Iran, at the Pentagon in Washington, DC, US, March 19, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Evan Vucci
The Pentagon is preparing for weeks of ground operations in Iran, the Washington Post reported Saturday, citing US officials.
The plans could involve raids by Special Operations and conventional infantry troops, the Post reported. Whether President Donald Trump would approve any of those plans remains uncertain, according to the Post.
The Trump administration has deployed US Marines to the Middle East as the war in Iran stretches into its fifth week, and also has been planning to send thousands of soldiers from the US Army’s 82nd Airborne to the region.
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America’s oldest synagogue closed. Then an unlikely group tended its cemetery.
In 1833, Herald of the Times, a Newport, Rhode Island, newspaper, reported that the remains of Mrs. Rebecca Lopez had been brought from New York by steamboat and placed inside Touro Synagogue.
Dedicated in 1763, the building is now recognized as the nation’s oldest surviving synagogue. Newport had once been home to a thriving colonial Jewish community, but after the Revolutionary War and the city’s economic decline, that community had largely faded. The cemetery remained, and so did the synagogue. It was during that long interval of near-absence that Lopez’s funeral briefly reopened Jewish ritual life in Newport.
After prayers were read by Rabbi Isaac Seixas of New York, the body was carried to the cemetery on Touro Street, with “the clergy, town council, and a numerous concourse of spectators” joining the funeral procession. The paper noted that a Jewish ceremony had not been performed there “for the space of forty years.”
Newport’s Jewish burial ground dated to 1677. In 1822, Abraham Touro left money for the upkeep of the cemetery, the synagogue, and the street on which they stood. The fund was placed under trustees appointed by the Rhode Island legislature, and Newport’s Town Council was later authorized to use the interest for repairs.
While Newport’s Jewish population declined, the endowment ensured that the synagogue building and cemetery grounds continued to be maintained. In 1826, the Town Council reported that it had tried to repair the synagogue using the Touro fund, but could not proceed because it had not been able to obtain the keys from Shearith Israel in New York. Many of Newport’s former Jewish residents had relocated there, and the congregations had longstanding ties.
In 1842, the council contracted to enclose the synagogue lot with a substantial stone wall and an ornamental cast-iron fence, modeled on the fence around the Jewish cemetery. The work included a Quincy granite base and a gateway on Touro Street designed to correspond with the synagogue’s portico. The project cost $6,835.
The synagogue’s doors rarely opened, and often only for moments of mourning. In June 1854, Newport received the body of Judah Touro, one of the most prominent American Jews of his era, a native of the town and brother of Abraham Touro. The Herald of the Times reported that “the streets was [sic] crowded with people, the stores all closed, and the bells tolled.”
The City Council assembled at City Hall and marched in procession to the synagogue, where “thousands remained outside” during the service. At the funeral, Newport’s mayor, William C. Cozzens, spoke of the trust that had long existed between the city and local Jewish families, recalling that the synagogue and cemetery had been left in Newport’s care and maintained there “with ample means for their preservation.”
When Henry Wadsworth Longfellow visited Newport’s Jewish cemetery that same year, he wrote of the graves as “silent beside the never-silent waves.” He noticed, too, what endured there: “Gone are the living, but the dead remain,” he observed, “and not neglected.”
Newport’s preservation of Jewish sacred space was shared. Jews endowed these places and returned to bury their dead there. Christian officials repaired, protected, and publicly honored them. In this way, a Jewish inheritance was carried forward until communal life returned.
In 1883, Touro Synagogue was rededicated and a new Jewish community established in Newport. But even in the window of years when the congregation was gone, the dead were not abandoned.
The graves were kept.
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