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The minotaur-slaying, dragon-battling hero of this video game is an old Jewish guy with back problems and an attitude
For a long time, Jews looking for representation in video games had to make do with the possible Jewishness of William Joseph Blazkowicz, the Nazi-hunting protagonist of the popular ‘90s video game series Wolfenstein.
A white, muscular, machine-gun-toting GI, with a lantern jaw and blue eyes, Blazkowicz didn’t exactly look the part. But his Polish ancestry, together with his enthusiasm for vanquishing Wehrmacht soldiers, left many Jews convinced. (Eventually, in 2017, Wolfenstein creator Tom Hall confirmed that the character’s mother was indeed a Polish Jew.)
Depictions of Jews in video games have, mercifully, improved in recent years, not least as the gaming industry has sought to reflect a wider range of identities and perspectives. The Shivah, published in 2006, told the story of a Manhattan rabbi caught up in a murder mystery. In 2020, The Last of Us, Part II introduced Dina, a Sephardi Jew with a fondness for apples and honey, while 2022’s Perfect Tides was an excellent coming-of-age story about a bashful 15-year-old New Yorker named Mara Whitefish. (Author and critic Josh Lambert described Perfect Tides as “the most compelling Jewish video game ever created.”)
To this growing roster of Jewish video games we can now add The Eternal Life of Goldman, the latest effort from independent game studio Weappy. Set to be released in full later this year, a demo version published last week received considerable praise online — and not just for its dazzling artwork and intuitive gameplay.
Rather, much of the intrigue and acclaim was because of the game’s improbable hero: a Jewish octogenarian with a yarmulke and a cane, the titular Mr. Goldman.
Although the demo is just the first 90 minutes of gameplay, it took me the better part of a day to get through. The game takes place on a vast archipelago populated by an array of menacing creatures — brilliantly brought to life by hand-drawn, 2D animations — and so death is ever present. For example, no sooner had I, as Goldman, arrived on the first of the game’s islands, than was I set upon by some kind of dragon-dinosaur hybrid. Goldman was promptly killed; he died with an arresting squeal. (The game’s sound effects are immense.)
It’s not clear why Goldman has opted to spend his presumably hard-earned retirement among volcanic ruins and thick underbrush. Palm Beach, this ain’t. Perhaps understandably, he isn’t so keen on the task at hand, which appears to be a rescue mission of sorts to retrieve a group of children known as “The Lost Ones,” though the demo ends before this is properly explained.
Still, Goldman is remarkably agile, with impressive powers of resurrection. The cane isn’t for walking, it turns out, so much as bouncing, thwacking and stabbing. It’s Goldman’s only companion as he faces down the beasts and monsters, most of which are lifted from a fable or myth. Besting the Minotaur, for instance, was the undoubted highpoint of a day’s gaming otherwise defined by my near-constant death.
Indeed, the game has a somewhat macabre feel. Even its framing device, a bedside conversation between a mother and daughter at a hospital, hints at a sinister plotline to come. (Ilya Yanovich, Weappy’s creative director, admitted as much in a recent interview.) In fact, the fairytales that the mother tells her ailing child seem to govern where Goldman ends up in the game. I was not the only reviewer for whom this called to mind the movie The Princess Bride — which, it’s worth noting, was written by one William Goldman.
This is just one among a host of Jewish, or Jewish-adjacent, references that cropped up in barely an hour-and-a-half of gameplay. There’s a faintly kabbalistic figure called Nissim Klein. Another character is named Hanoch. All three men — Goldman, Klein, Hanoch — periodically yell time-honored Yiddishisms like “Oy Vey!” and “Ach.” And at one point, we’re told about a group of giant clay statues “built by Nissim’s ancestors,” which feels more than a little Passover-coded.
Despite my difficulties progressing through the demo, then, the artwork, the Jewishness, the propulsive narrative energy, the main character’s cynicism, the simple left-to-right gameplay — it was all more than enough to sustain me.
Yet, at the risk of reading too much into a small slice of a much larger pie, it’s worth considering how Goldman communicates its Jewishness. For one thing, the game is, in at least one respect, the anti-Wolfenstein: While Blazkowicz’s Jewishness was merely gestured at, Goldman’s is unambiguous. And for another, Goldman places its Jewish protagonist in something other than a Jewish ceremony or ritual. (My apologies to the aforementioned The Shivah.) These are both salutary developments, the more so at a time of rising antisemitism, online and elsewhere.
But Goldman is a stereotype, too, albeit a largely inoffensive one. He’s a cantankerous older Jew with a hunch and a limp whose dialogue, in the demo at least, mostly consists of kvetching and confusion.
Now, is it amusing to see Goldman bouncing through the forest, battling mythical beasts and natural disasters, all while expectorating constantly? Certainly. Is the incongruity the point? Maybe. Still, it feels like a missed opportunity that Weappy selected a somewhat backward-facing protagonist as its vehicle for Jewishness — especially as Jewish identity becomes increasingly variegated with each passing generation.
The Eternal Life of Goldman is a valuable affirmation of a particular flavor of Jewishness, sure, and given the stir that the demo generated online, it doubtless will do very well. I can’t help but feel, however, that a less played-out protagonist might have compelled Yanovich — who is Jewish — to include some fresher, more interesting modes of Jewish cultural and ethnic expression.
After all, we’re more than yiddish and yarmulkes.
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Ukraine reburies Nazi collaborator with state honors, drawing Israeli condemnation
(JTA) — Israel criticized Ukraine Monday after President Volodymyr Zelensky gave full state honors to a Ukrainian nationalist leader who was part of a movement that collaborated with the Nazis during World War II.
During a reburial ceremony on Sunday, Zelensky described Andriy Melnyk and his wife, Sofia Fedak-Melnyk, as “iconic Ukrainians of the 20th century who are deeply respected,” according to The New York Times.
Melnyk led one of the factions of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists during its collaboration with Nazi Germany during World War II. Though the Ukrainian organization shared a mutual opposition to Soviet rule with the Nazis, it also promoted antisemitic rhetoric and some of its members participated in the persecution of Jews during the Holocaust. Melnyk initially sought cooperation with Nazi Germany but was later detained by the Nazis as relations with Ukrainian nationalist groups deteriorated.
The ceremony marked the latest flashpoint in a longstanding dispute over Ukraine’s commemoration of World War II-era nationalist figures linked to Nazi collaboration. In 2018, the country designated the birthday of Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera as a holiday, and in 2017, a statue was unveiled honoring a nationalist leader whose regime killed tens of thousands of Jews in pogroms during the Russian Revolution.
The remains of Melnyk and his wife were exhumed from Luxembourg last week and then transported to Ukraine for reburial at Kyiv’s National Military Memorial, which opened last year for soldiers killed in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“Glory to every Ukrainian hero! Glory to all our Ukrainian warriors! Glory to our people!,” Zelensky, who is Jewish, wrote in a post on X marking the ceremony, adding that he was “grateful to everyone who has worked to make such returns of great Ukrainian figures possible and to give the Ukrainian People their own pantheon of heroes.”
The reburial was quickly decried by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, which wrote in a post on X that it was “deeply troubled by such national commemorations, which come at the expense of historical truth and the memory of Holocaust victims.”
“Honoring the leader of a movement that supported and collaborated with Nazi Germany during the persecution and murder of millions of Jews undermines the moral integrity essential to Holocaust remembrance,” the post read.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry wrote on X that there is “no place for ignoring historical truth and the memory of the victims murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators.”
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Trump administration again sues UCLA over antisemitism, alleging ‘hostile educational environment’
(JTA) — The U.S. Department of Justice sued the University of California for the second time this year over allegations of an antisemitic campus environment at UCLA, claiming the school “was deliberately indifferent to the suffering of its Jewish and Israeli students” after Oct. 7.
The federal lawsuit, filed Tuesday, claims UCLA violated the students’ civil rights by failing to intervene during pro-Palestinian encampment activity in early 2024. It follows an earlier suit that focused on the university’s treatment of its Jewish and Israeli employees, and comes 10 days after the university unveiled its own “Initiative to Combat Antisemitism.”
“Earlier this year, we sued UCLA for subjecting its Jewish and Israeli employees to an antisemitic hostile work environment,” assistant U.S. attorney general Harmeet Dhillon said in a press release. “Now, the Department of Justice calls UCLA to account for its toleration of the equally appalling hostile educational environment against its Jewish and Israeli students.”
Requests for comment to the Justice Department and UCLA were not immediately returned.
The new suit draws on widely reported accounts of UCLA’s campus environment in spring 2024, when protesters in pro-Palestinian encampments clashed with pro-Israel counter-protesters, sparking violence and turmoil. The failure to protect Jewish students violated their Title VI civil rights, attorneys said.
Citing the report of UCLA’s own task force on antisemitism, published in response to the 2024 campus upheaval, the suit states, “UCLA’s leadership apparently preferred a do-nothing ‘de-escalation strategy’ to protecting their Jewish and Israeli students from an angry mob organized by peers armed with tasers, lumber, and a sword.”
The Justice Department is seeking several redress measures, including the return of all federal grants made to UCLA “during the time of UCLA’s noncompliance with Title VI.” The school had previously resolved several Title VI antisemitism cases under the Biden administration, and also reached a $6.13 million settlement with Jewish groups in a private suit related to the spring 2024 incidents on campus — a case cited in DOJ’s new lawsuit.
The Trump administration has sought to make a particular example of UCLA in its aggressive approach to campus antisemitism. Officials had sought to levy fines in excess of $1 billion against the public university for its alleged failure to protect Jewish and Israeli students, until a federal judge intervened. Several DOJ lawyers have left the department over its UCLA investigation, telling reporters the case was “fraudulent,” a “sham” and driven by pressure to “find” evidence to support further legal action against UCLA.
In addition, some of the most violent clashes on the campuses included perpetrators on both sides of the conflict, leading some members of the UCLA Jewish community to complain that pro-Israel counter-protesters ultimately undercut the Jewish students’ legitimate grievances regarding the harassment they had been facing inside the campus gates.
And the campus environment for Jews remains tense. Last month, the UCLA student senate condemned a campus visit by a freed Israeli hostage, drawing blowback from a university regent.
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Jewish leaders say Belgium’s prosecution of circumcision is antisemitic
(JTA) — Dozens of European Jewish leaders, joined by Israeli and American diplomats, decried Antwerp prosecutors who plan to charge two Jewish men with performing illegal circumcisions.
In an open letter on Tuesday to European and Belgian officials, 45 communal and religious Jewish leaders accused the Antwerp Public Prosecutor’s Office of “effectively criminalizing the act of circumcision” and infringing on religious freedom.
Earlier this month, Belgian prosecutors announced their recommendation to refer two mohels, or ritual circumcisers, to the criminal court following investigations into alleged illegal circumcisions.
In Belgium, the law requires all circumcisions to be performed by licensed medical professionals. The two men would be charged with intentional assault or battery against minors and the unlawful practice of medicine.
The European Jewish leaders responded that prosecuting mohels was “antisemitic in nature, reminiscent of efforts taken in Europe against Jewish practice prior to the Second World War.”
They said the potential prosecutions sent a message that “Jews are no longer welcome in Belgium” and “Belgian Jews are now second class citizens with limited rights.” Their appeal was led by the chairman of the European Jewish Association, Rabbi Menachem Margolin.
Israeli and U.S. officials have also accused Belgium of targeting Jews for practicing their faith.
Gideon Saar, Israel’s minister of foreign affairs, called the prosecutors’ decision a “scarlet letter on Belgian society.” He was joined by the U.S. ambassador to Belgium, Bill White, who said on X that Belgium “will be thought of now as anti Semitic by world.”
Belgium’s foreign minister fired back that it was “inappropriate to publicly criticize a country and tarnish its image simply because you disagree with judicial proceedings.”
“I recall that the proceedings in question were initiated by representatives of the Jewish community themselves,” said Maxime Prévot. “To portray those as a country’s desire to undermine the religious freedom of Jews is defamatory.”
The mohels were first investigated after complaints lodged by Moshe Aryeh Friedman, an Antwerp rabbi. He alleged in 2023 that six local mohels practiced metzitzah b’peh, in which the circumciser cleans the circumcision wound with oral suction. Over the past two decades, several infants in New York City were infected with herpes as a result of the practice.
The letter from European Jewish leaders did not address Friedman’s claims.
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