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A Holocaust museum is launching in Fortnite. Can video games fight antisemitism?

(JTA) — There’s no way to win “The Light in the Darkness,” a new video game where the characters are members of a French-Jewish family in the years before and during the Holocaust.
No matter what choices the player makes, they will be murdered by Nazis — a dark end that the game’s creator says is essential to its success as an educational tool.
“I didn’t want to make it seem like people in the Holocaust had a choice,” said Luc Bernard, a 37-year-old British-French video game designer who has spent his entire adult life developing “The Light in the Darkness.” “It was all pure luck, the people who managed to live.”
Bernard’s vision for the game is only one prong in his expansive, enduring and at times quixotic mission to bring Holocaust education to the video game landscape. This week, a virtual Holocaust museum called Voices of the Forgotten opened inside Fortnite, one of the most widely played games in the world, as the result of his efforts.
The museum includes general information about the Holocaust as well as plaques on lesser-known stories like the Tripolitania riots and Dutch resistance fighter Willem Arondéus; some of its information was pulled directly from Wikipedia. Still, Bernard is hopeful that it will lead to a better understanding of the Holocaust among gamers.
“The reality is, video games are the number-one-used platform now,” Bernard said. “They’re bigger than movies, they’re bigger than music. Video games are the future of storytelling. So that’s why I also saw this as kind of a perfect platform to educate about the Holocaust.”
Yet Bernard’s single-minded quest to use the medium to teach about the Holocaust continues to elicit deep skepticism — including among groups like the Anti-Defamation League that have identified antisemitism among gamers as an increasing problem.
“I think this is obviously a tough, probably impossible, educational piece to gamify,” said Brian Soileau, the chief business officer of Lost Tribe, an organization that uses video games such as Fortnite and Minecraft to engage Jewish teens.
An image from Voices of the Forgotten, a virtual Holocaust museum built inside the popular video game Fortnite. Players could access the museum starting in August 2023. (Courtesy of Voices of the Forgotten)
For Bernard, the path to a Fortnite Holocaust museum began when he was a teenager and learned about his own family’s Holocaust story. Raised without a Jewish identity in what he called “a rural, poor area of France,” Bernard was in high school when he discovered that his grandmother had been a British Jew who had helped rescue Jewish children on the Kindertransport, which granted thousands of children safe passage to the United Kingdom from Nazi-occupied territory during the Holocaust.
“Everyone hid it, pretty much,” Bernard said about the family history. His grandmother had changed her name several times and that the family’s Judaism only emerged after a long-lost family member reappeared.
Soon after, he was shown “Schindler’s List” in school. The immersive story transported him to another time and place, one where the horrors of what happened to the Jews of Europe were presented in stark detail.
A gamer himself, he immediately realized that video games could offer a similarly immersive experience — and that games didn’t have to be “fun” to be illuminating.
In 2008, when he was 21, Bernard first shared blueprints for his planned venture: a Nintendo DS game called Imagination Is The Only Escape, which he envisioned as a surreal storybook journey into the fanciful mind of a Jewish child being rounded up by the Nazis. Players would experience horrors as illustrated metaphors, before suddenly being yanked back into “reality” — although no violence would be shown on screen.
From the game’s earliest stages of development, Bernard was quick to publicize it. But media attention about his efforts stirred up considerable backlash from people who he said misunderstood the project and thought he was being insensitive. Jewish and Holocaust memory organizations were insulted at what they believed was a desecration of the victims’ memories. Nintendo issued a statement saying it would not distribute the game in North America.
“People are thinking, ‘Oh my God, a video game about the Holocaust,’” he recalled. “So it was quite divisive. You had some organizations be like, ‘What the f–k is he doing?’”
Bernard abandoned that game, blaming the backlash — though he briefly tried to resurrect the idea in 2013, launching a new crowdfunding campaign that proved unsuccessful. But even as he busied himself with work designing other games, he still couldn’t shake the idea of bringing Holocaust education to the games space, especially as online gaming communities boomed in recent years and antisemitism boomed alongside, and inside, them.
The gaming industry, which had already been growing steadily, exploded during the pandemic, generating more than $200 billion in revenue in 2022 — more than twice the value of the industry in 2016, and a number substantially bigger than movies and sports combined. There are around 3 billion active video game players worldwide, a number that includes players of so-called “casual” games on mobile devices; studies suggest that between 70 and 99% of all American teenagers play games.
The multi-billion-dollar games industry boasts a global user base that heavily skews young and male, and online multiplayer games have become a fertile recruiting ground for white nationalists and antisemites. In addition, popular game streamers and YouTubers, like PewDiePie, began dabbling in antisemitic rhetoric laced with heavy doses of irony, an approach that courted controversy and followers. The ADL found that 15% of young gamers and 20% of adults said they were exposed to white supremacist ideologies in video games last year — a proportion that the organization says is on the rise.
Casual antisemitism, including Holocaust jokes, is so prevalent that some gamers say it can almost stop being noticeable. Jake Offenheim, Lost Tribe’s director of influencer marketing, said he has encountered so much antisemitism within gaming that it doesn’t faze him anymore.
“I’m an avid Jewish gamer. I’ve been playing video games my entire life, and I’ve been the victim of many Jewish slurs,” he said. “There’s definitely a subset of these people that are 13-year-old kids that think the funniest thing to say is, ‘You should have died in the gas chamber.’”
Decades of education initiatives have proceeded from the idea that learning about the Holocaust would make young adults less likely to joke about it or, in more extreme cases, less likely to adopt hateful ideologies. While that idea has faced challenges more recently, Bernard couldn’t shake it and decided to try again with a new Holocaust game built for a new generation of gamers.
By 2021, when he started on “The Light in the Darkness,” his efforts had been dormant for so long that the Nintendo DS had become obsolete. So he turned instead to newer platforms, overhauling his core idea to fit. Instead of fantasy and surrealism, his new game would be rooted in cold, hard reality — that of how the collaborationist Vichy government worked with the Nazis to round up Jews in his own country.
The game would incorporate authentic documents from the time period to show the bureaucracy the Nazis used to suppress the Jews. Its plot would be based on real survivor testimony, and its digital renderings of occupied France would hew as close to actual history as possible.
“The project hasn’t changed, but the intent behind it has,” he said of his vision, noting that his original idea of a “more artistic” approach to the Holocaust no longer seemed relevant as, in his eyes, the severity of antisemitism in gaming spaces increased. “Now it’s turned into something where I feel like it has to be done because things are getting so bad,” he said, speaking to his desire to make the game “100% accurate because you don’t want anyone to say, ‘This is inaccurate and then the Holocaust didn’t happen.’”
An image from “The Light in the Darkness,” a video game designed by Luc Bernard to teach players about the Holocaust. Bernard released the game in 2023 after 15 years of development. (Voices of the Forgotten via YouTube)
Most significantly, every character would die. (The outcome is similar to that of a Holocaust video game that serves as a plot point in the 2022 bestseller “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow,” by Jewish Korean-American novelist Gabrielle Zevin. “Everyone loses,” the 19-year-old who develops the game says, to plaudits from her professors.)
Over the last few months, Bernard has been rolling out the game’s release on PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 5. He’s giving it away for free — “I’m insane,” he said, laughing, about this decision. “I’m absolutely bonkers” — and accompanying its release with museum exhibits, public talks and, most visibly, the Fortnite installation. More than 500,000 people have so far played and finished “The Light in the Darkness,” Bernard said.
Bernard’s game and approach have drawn mixed responses — including about whether it can be pulled off respectfully enough to still be engaging.
Andrew Denning, director of the museum studies program at the University of Kansas, who has published papers on video games and history, said efforts to bring Holocaust education to the games space are “incredibly important.” But he said he thought building a game without traditional game elements, like winning, was liable to turn players off.
“People still play games to have this sense of agency, to solve problems, to ‘win,’” Denning said. “Recognizing the incredibly narrow set of choices that individuals who were targeted during the Holocaust had, that doesn’t make for a compelling game.”
The choice not to allow anyone to win, Denning noted, has implications beyond what it’s like to play the game. “The experience of victims of the Holocaust, and even those who survive, is [of] being almost entirely stripped of agency,” he said. (The vast majority of French Jews did survive the Holocaust, making it an outlier in Nazi-occupied Europe.)
Offenheim, too, says he sees potential in using video games to teach the Holocaust. “I think what he’s trying to do is a super noble cause,” he said about Bernard. “I think bringing accessible Holocaust education on the Internet has to be the way of the future.”
But Bernard’s approach could have drawbacks, Offenheim said. Lost Tribe has recreated several Israeli locations in Minecraft for its community and is developing a game to be hosted within Fortnite to teach about the siege of Masada during the Jewish-Roman Wars of the 1st century. So he knows that these games’ restrictions on religious and violent imagery can be a limitation.
“Doing it through Fortnite might bring its own host of challenges, in terms of respect and in terms of what you can and can’t show,” Offenheim said, noting that Lost Tribe was not allowed to include a Star of David in its virtual Jewish summer camp. (He got his job after recreating Camp Ramah in Canada inside Minecraft as a pandemic activity.)
A rendition of a shuk, or Israeli market, built inside the video game Minecraft by the organization Lost Tribe, which works to build Jewish community among young people in online spaces. (Courtesy of Lost Tribe)
Lost Tribe is working with the ADL on broader strategies for combating the kind of antisemitism young people often encounter online, including in games. The group reports instances of antisemitism on its Discord channel through the ADL, adding to its data collection about hatred against Jews in online spaces, and it also provides guidance on how to think about antisemitism on platforms like TikTok.
“They know that there’s an area they’re leaning into as far as antisemitism in online spaces, and we’re able to give a lot of feedback on that,” Soileau said.
Bernard, on the other hand, has harsh words for establishment Jewish groups who, he says, haven’t taken video games seriously enough. His request to partner with the ADL on his game have been met with “total silence,” he says, accusing the Jewish civil-rights group and its ilk of being more focused on surveys than solutions.
“‘Sign a petition to make Activision change things,’” he said, invoking the blockbuster publisher of the “Call of Duty” series to mock the approach the ADL takes in addressing antisemitism concerns that pop up in video games. “You really think a big, billion-dollar company is going to give a s–t about your thing?”
An ADL spokesperson would not comment on Bernard’s characterization of the group. But in a statement, its CEO Jonathan Greenblatt called Bernard’s Fortnite museum “potentially worthwhile.”
Greenblatt said he was encouraged by the fact that virtual visitors to the Fortnite museum will have their onscreen communication tools disabled and will be unable to manipulate the environment. “We commend the creators of this ‘Fortnite’ experience for utilizing one of the most influential mediums of our time — online games — to build a new kind of Holocaust museum,” he said.
An ADL spokesperson added that the group isn’t focusing on projects like the museum because its interest in the games space is primarily focused on how online multiplayer games function as “social platforms.”
In a subsequent statement to The New York Times, Greenblatt took a harsher view of the Fortnite museum’s utility, saying, “Until the game industry can change the norms of hate and abuse in online multiplayer games, we cannot view experiences like these as a true alternative to more traditional forms of Holocaust education.”
Over the course of the 15 years that Bernard has been trying to bring Holocaust education into the games space, one consistent anxiety from establishment Jewish groups has been around whether the setting allows for proper respect to be paid to the subject matter. That worry helped doom his first game attempt, and it has been a theme of the early responses to the Fortnite museum, as well. But Soileau thinks such concerns are missing the point of an endeavor like this, which is to reach players where they are most likely to pay attention.
“Is it disrespectful for you to be in a Spider-Man avatar costume while reading some of the plaques in the Holocaust Museum on Fortnite?” he asked. “That’s the part we have to get over. This is not meant to be like going to Yad Vashem, right? … We’re all about meeting kids where they are, and that’s meeting them where they are. They are online, in a Spider-Man costume, and that’s OK, let’s teach.”
How much can one well-intentioned game turn the tide of antisemitism in the games space? Bernard likes to point to another game he developed, in between his Holocaust projects: a free-to-play online game sponsored by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the animal-rights group. He saw firsthand how even players skeptical of the group’s mission found themselves playing, and enjoying, the game.
“It was very interesting to see them on YouTube, because they were like, ‘F–k PETA, I’m gonna eat a cow or something,’” Bernard recalled. “They started out with that. But towards the end, they started [saying], ‘Yeah, animal rights are a thing. We should be nice to animals.’”
“That’s pretty much what I think will happen,” he said, going so far as to predict that even people who hate Jews will want to play his game “and might get emotional from the story.”
“I’m not saying I’m going to solve the Nazi, white supremacist problem,” he said. “But I think it will help in reducing it.”
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Colorado Attack Suspect Charged with Assault, Use of Explosives

FILE PHOTO: Boulder attack suspect Mohamed Sabry Soliman poses for a jail booking photograph after his arrest in Boulder, Colorado, U.S. June 2, 2025. Photo: Boulder Police Department/Handout via REUTERS
A suspect in an attack on a pro-Israeli rally in Colorado that injured eight people was being held on Monday on an array of charges, including assault and the use of explosives, in lieu of a $10-million bail, according to Boulder County records.
The posted list of felony charges against suspect Mohamed Sabry Soliman, 45, in the attack on Sunday also includes charges of murder in the first degree, although police in the city of Boulder have said on social media that no victims died in the attack. Authorities could not be reached immediately to clarify.
Witnesses reported the suspect used a makeshift flamethrower and threw an incendiary device into the crowd. He was heard to yell “Free Palestine” during the attack, according to the FBI, in what the agency called a “targeted terror attack.”
Four women and four men between 52 and 88 years of age were transported to hospitals after the attack, Boulder Police said.
The attack took place on the Pearl Street Mall, a popular pedestrian shopping district near the University of Colorado, during an event organized by Run for Their Lives, an organization devoted to drawing attention to the hostages seized in the aftermath of Hamas’ 2023 attack on Israel.
Rabbi Yisroel Wilhelm, the Chabad director at the University of Colorado, Boulder, told CBS Colorado that the 88-year-old victim was a Holocaust refugee who fled Europe.
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said Soliman had entered the country in August 2022 on a tourist visa that expired in February 2023. He filed for asylum in September 2022. “The suspect, Mohamed Soliman, is illegally in our country,” the spokesperson said.
The FBI raided and searched Soliman’s home in El Paso County, Colorado, the agency said on social media. “As this is an ongoing investigation, no additional information is available at this time.”
The attack in Boulder was the latest act of violence aimed at Jewish Americans linked to outrage over Israel’s escalating military offensive in Gaza. It followed the fatal shooting of two Israel Embassy aides that took place outside Washington’s Capital Jewish Museum last month.
Ron Halber, CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington, said after the shooting there was a question of how far security perimeters outside Jewish institutions should extend.
Boulder Police said they would hold a press conference later on Monday to discuss details of the Colorado attack.
The Denver office of the FBI, which is handling the case, did not immediately respond to emails or phone calls seeking clarification on the homicide charges or other details in the case.
Officials from the Boulder County Jail, Boulder Police and Boulder County Sheriff’s Office did not immediately respond to inquiries.
The post Colorado Attack Suspect Charged with Assault, Use of Explosives first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Iran Poised to Dismiss US Nuclear Proposal, Iranian Diplomat Says

Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi attends a press conference following a meeting with Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Moscow, Russia, April 18, 2025. Photo: Tatyana Makeyeva/Pool via REUTERS
Iran is poised to reject a US proposal to end a decades-old nuclear dispute, an Iranian diplomat said on Monday, dismissing it as a “non-starter” that fails to address Tehran’s interests or soften Washington’s stance on uranium enrichment.
“Iran is drafting a negative response to the US proposal, which could be interpreted as a rejection of the US offer,” the senior diplomat, who is close to Iran’s negotiating team, told Reuters.
The US proposal for a new nuclear deal was presented to Iran on Saturday by Omani Foreign Minister Sayyid Badr Albusaidi, who was on a short visit to Tehran and has been mediating talks between Tehran and Washington.
After five rounds of discussions between Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi and President Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, several obstacles remain.
Among them are Iran’s rejection of a US demand that it commit to scrapping uranium enrichment and its refusal to ship abroad its entire existing stockpile of highly enriched uranium – possible raw material for nuclear bombs.
Tehran says it wants to master nuclear technology for peaceful purposes and has long denied accusations by Western powers that it is seeking to develop nuclear weapons.
“In this proposal, the US stance on enrichment on Iranian soil remains unchanged, and there is no clear explanation regarding the lifting of sanctions,” said the diplomat, who declined to be identified due to the sensitivity of the matter.
Araqchi said Tehran would formally respond to the proposal soon.
Tehran demands the immediate removal of all US-imposed curbs that impair its oil-based economy. But the US says nuclear-related sanctions should be removed in phases.
Dozens of institutions vital to Iran’s economy, including its central bank and national oil company, have been blacklisted since 2018 for, according to Washington, “supporting terrorism or weapons proliferation.”
Trump’s revival of “maximum pressure” against Tehran since his return to the White House in January has included tightening sanctions and threatening to bomb Iran if the negotiations yield no deal.
During his first term in 2018, Trump ditched Tehran’s 2015 nuclear pact with six powers and reimposed sanctions that have crippled Iran’s economy. Iran responded by escalating enrichment far beyond the pact’s limits.
Under the deal, Iran had until 2018 curbed its sensitive nuclear work in return for relief from US, EU and U.N. economic sanctions.
The diplomat said the assessment of “Iran’s nuclear negotiations committee,” under the supervision of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was that the US proposal was “completely one-sided” and could not serve Tehran’s interests.
Therefore, the diplomat said, Tehran considers this proposal a “non-starter” and believes it unilaterally attempts to impose a “bad deal” on Iran through excessive demands.
NUCLEAR STANDOFF RAISES MIDDLE EAST TENSIONS
The stakes are high for both sides. Trump wants to curtail Tehran’s potential to produce a nuclear weapon that could trigger a regional nuclear arms race and perhaps threaten Israel. Iran’s clerical establishment, for its part, wants to be rid of the devastating sanctions.
Iran says it is ready to accept some limits on enrichment, but needs watertight guarantees that Washington would not renege on a future nuclear accord.
Two Iranian officials told Reuters last week that Iran could pause uranium enrichment if the US released frozen Iranian funds and recognized Tehran’s right to refine uranium for civilian use under a “political deal” that could lead to a broader nuclear accord.
Iran’s arch-foe Israel sees Iran’s nuclear program as an existential threat and says it would never allow Tehran to obtain nuclear weapons.
Araqchi, in a joint news conference with his Egyptian counterpart in Cairo, said: “I do not think Israel will commit such a mistake as to attack Iran.”
Tehran’s regional influence has meanwhile been diminished by military setbacks suffered by its forces and those of its allies in the Shi’ite-dominated “Axis of Resistance,” which include Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen, and Iraqi militias.
In April, Saudi Arabia’s defence minister delivered a blunt message to Iranian officials to take Trump’s offer of a new deal seriously as a way to avoid the risk of war with Israel.
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The Islamist Crescent: A New Syrian Danger

Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa speaks during a joint press conference with French President Emmanuel Macron after a meeting at the Elysee Palace in Paris, France, May 7, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Stephanie Lecocq/Pool
The dramatic fall of the Assad regime in Syria has undeniably reshaped the Middle East, yet the emerging power dynamics, particularly the alignment between Saudi Arabia and Turkey, warrant profound scrutiny from those committed to American and Israeli security. While superficially presented as a united front against Iranian influence, this new Sunni axis carries a dangerous undercurrent of Islamism and regional ambition that could ultimately undermine, rather than serve, the long-term interests of Washington and Jerusalem.
For too long, Syria under Bashar al-Assad served as a critical conduit for Iran’s destabilizing agenda, facilitating arms transfers to Hezbollah and projecting Tehran’s power across the Levant. The removal of this linchpin is, on the surface, a strategic victory. However, the nature of the new Syrian government, led by Ahmed al-Sharaa — a figure Israeli officials continue to view with deep suspicion due to his past as a former Al-Qaeda-linked commander — raises immediate red flags. This is not merely a change of guard; it is a shift that introduces a new set of complex challenges, particularly given Turkey’s historical support for the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization deemed a terror group by Saudi Arabia and many other regional states.
Israel’s strategic calculus in Syria has always been clear: to degrade Iran’s military presence, prevent Hezbollah from acquiring advanced weaponry, and maintain operational freedom in Syrian airspace. Crucially, Israel has historically thought it best to have a decentralized, weak, and fragmented Syria, with reports that it has actively worked against the resurgence of a robust central authority. This preference stems from a pragmatic understanding that a strong, unified Syria, especially one under the tutelage of an ambitious regional power like Turkey, could pose much more of a threat than the Assad regime ever did. Indeed, Israeli defense officials privately express concern at Turkey’s assertive moves, accusing Ankara of attempting to transform post-war Syria into a Turkish protectorate under Islamist tutelage. This concern is not unfounded; Turkey’s ambitious, arguably expansionist, objectives — and its perceived undue dominance in Arab lands — are viewed by Israel as warily as Iran’s previous influence.
The notion that an “Ottoman Crescent” is now replacing the “Shiite Crescent” should not be celebrated as a net positive. While it may diminish Iranian power, it introduces a new form of regional hegemony, one driven by an ideology that has historically been antithetical to Western values and stability. The European Union’s recent imposition of sanctions on Turkish-backed Syrian army commanders for human rights abuses, including arbitrary killings and torture, further underscores the problematic nature of some elements within this new Syrian landscape. The fact that al-Sharaa has allowed such individuals to operate with impunity and even promoted them to high-ranking positions should give Washington pause.
From an American perspective, while the Trump administration has pragmatically engaged with the new Syrian government, lifting sanctions and urging normalization with Israel, this engagement must be tempered with extreme caution. The core American interests in the Middle East — counterterrorism, containment of Iran, and regional stability — are not served by empowering Islamist-leaning factions or by enabling a regional power, like Turkey, whose actions have sometimes undermined the broader fight against ISIS. Washington must demand that Damascus demonstrate a genuine commitment to taking over the counter-ISIS mission and managing detention facilities, and unequivocally insist that Turkey cease actions that risk an ISIS resurgence.
The argument that Saudi Arabia and Turkey, despite their own complex internal dynamics, are simply pragmatic actors countering Iran overlooks the ideological underpinnings that concern many conservatives. Turkey’s ruling party, rooted in political Islam, and its historical ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, present a fundamental challenge to the vision of a stable, secular, and pro-Western Middle East. While Saudi Arabia has designated the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization, its alignment with Turkey in Syria, and its own internal human rights record, means that this “new front” is far from a clean solution.
The Saudi-Turkey alignment in Syria is a double-edged sword. While it may indeed serve to counter Iran’s immediate regional ambitions, it simultaneously risks empowering actors whose long-term objectives and ideological leanings are deeply problematic for American, Israeli, and Western interests. Washington and Jerusalem must approach this new dynamic with extreme vigilance, prioritizing the containment of all forms of radicalism — whether Shiite or Sunni — and ensuring that any strategic gains against Iran do not inadvertently pave the way for a new, equally dangerous, Islamist crescent to rise in the heart of the Levant.
Amine Ayoub, a fellow at the Middle East Forum, is a policy analyst and writer based in Morocco. Follow him on X: @amineayoubx
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