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This gaming platform has ‘zero tolerance’ for antisemitism. Holocaust reenactments keep reappearing anyway.
As the game “German Camp” begins, you arrive at a virtual building with a large German flag on display. There, on the gaming platform Roblox, your avatar can put on a helmet labelled “Stahlhelm,” the steel headgear worn by Nazi soldiers during World War II. Next door, soldiers stand watch over fenced-in barracks where characters labeled “noobs” — a derogatory term for inexperienced gamers — line up to be killed.
“This is the best place in the world,” a user named Bravado writes in the chat before shooting your character — as happened to this reporter.
Roblox, where users can create their own virtual worlds — and explore millions more made by other players — says it has a zero tolerance policy against antisemitism. But Holocaust scenes and imagery have continued to appear on the platform for years.
In 2022, Roblox removed a simulation of Nazi gas chambers, which users could operate by pressing “execute.” The Global Network on Extremism & Technology found a game titled “1941 – Konzentrationslager Auschwitz” on the platform in October 2025.
“Hate or harassment targeting Jewish people or any religious community is strictly prohibited on our platform,” Roblox spokesperson Eric Porterfield wrote in a statement, adding that “we take swift enforcement action against users we find violating our rules.”
Roblox removed “German Camp” shortly after the Forward’s inquiry about the game and confirmed it violated the platform’s policies. The game, advertised for ages 13 and older, had been played 174 times and was available for about two years.
‘No system is perfect’
Roblox prohibits content that “recreates specific real-world sensitive events” and “supports, glorifies, or promotes the perpetrators or outcome of such events,” including the Holocaust.
But “no system is perfect,” Porterfield wrote in a statement, adding that Roblox relies on a combination of AI detection, human reviewers, and community reporting to identify and remove antisemitic content.
In the case of the “German Camp” game, a member of Roblox’s public policy team told the Forward that the game would have been flagged immediately had it used the term “concentration camp.” Without such keywords, however, content can be more difficult to detect.
Roblox’s AI filters scan for terms like “Nazi,” automatically removing some content and identifying ambiguous cases for human review. The company works with thousands of contractors to evaluate flagged material, and players can also report misconduct directly. Roblox said it then evaluates player histories to help determine the severity of the offense, and disciplines players accordingly.
But Constantin Winkler, a researcher at the Global Network on Extremism & Technology who has studied extremist content on Roblox, said users evade these guardrails by intentionally misspelling words or communicating in code.
For instance, the Global Network on Extremism & Technology identified usernames such as “lolocaust,” “Atolf Zitler,” and the use of “88” — code for “Heil Hitler,” with “H” being the eighth letter of the alphabet.
Roblox said it found and removed 61 accounts, one game, and two groups that violated their policies after the Global Network on Extremism & Technology’s report in October about extremist content on Roblox.
But the Forward this month identified users named “konzentrationKamp,” “konzentrationausch,” “konzentrations_lager,” and “holowocaust,” and games titled “The Camp 1942” and “271k or 6 million,” referencing the conspiratorial claim that only 271,000 Jews were killed in the Holocaust. Other problematic content was more explicit: a game titled “JEWS,” featuring images of men in black hats clutching money bags, or “LIFE IN ISRAHELL,” featuring Stars of David set ablaze.
“They try to take some things down, but you can always find it again,” Winkler said.
Roblox works with organizations including the Anti-Defamation League, Tech Against Terrorism, and the Simon Wiesenthal Center to constantly audit and strengthen its moderation policies, according to its policy on safety and civility.
According to Winkler, Roblox users also frequently encounter players building or drawing swastikas during live gameplay. Because these actions happen in real time, he said, they are far more difficult to moderate than problematic usernames or pre-built worlds.
That’s a familiar challenge for Tristan Brown, a 19-year-old Jewish college student who was playing a Roblox spray-paint game when, suddenly, his player was surrounded by graffitied swastikas. He and his friends quickly logged off.
“It makes me want to stop playing on the platform, because if I’m gonna be playing, why can’t I be respected?” Brown told the Forward. “I wish there was more of a crackdown on things like that.”
A broader challenge
Video games reenacting concentration camps are not new: In 1991, a video game called “KZ Manager” circulated in Austria and Germany, where the player runs the Treblinka death camp.
Hate groups have also long used video games as a medium of choice. In 2002, the white supremacist group National Alliance created a video game titled “Ethnic Cleansing,” a first-person shooter game where players participate in a race war, killing stereotypically-depicted Jews, African Americans and Latinos.
But these games are generally created by extremists, for extremists, Winkler said. Roblox, meanwhile, is a mainstream gaming platform with 82.9 million daily active users last year. About 40% of its users are under the age of 13.
Roblox is far from the only popular gaming platform that’s struggled to crack down on hateful content: Minecraft, Steam, and Discord have all come under fire for neo-Nazi content — as has virtually every video game or streaming platform with a substantial following. In the digital era, it’s practically a given that platforms built around user-generated content will attract hate. Video games, many of which combine anonymity, creative freedom, simulated violence, and the ability to interact with other players, are especially fertile ground for extremism, Winkler said.
In response to the spread of extremist content, educational Holocaust-themed video games have emerged, including a virtual Holocaust museum hosted on Fortnite. But these efforts have also drawn harassment: The project’s release was delayed after white nationalist influencer Nick Fuentes urged neo-Nazis to target it.
A 2022 survey from the Anti-Defamation League found that 34% of Jewish gamers said they experienced identity-based harassment while playing. Players most often encountered white-supremacist ideologies in the games Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, Valorant, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, and Fortnite, the ADL found. Then last year, the ADL tried logging onto various video games with the username “Proud2BJewish” — and 38% of their gameplay sessions resulted in some form of harassment.
Meanwhile, overmoderation — particularly when it relies on unreliable artificial intelligence — can backfire, sweeping up innocent users and undermining trust in moderation systems. At the same time that Roblox has faced scrutiny for failing to curb antisemitism, its forums are rife with complaints that the platform’s moderation system is plagued by false positives.
Efforts to police content in video games have also long raised concerns about censorship and government overreach. After the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, a moral panic took hold around video games when the perpetrators, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, were revealed to be avid players of violent video games. Subsequent research has largely failed to establish a causal link between violent video games and real-world violence.
For Winkler, the central danger is not that a player will encounter a depiction of a concentration camp and immediately become radicalized. Instead, he said, the concern is more insidious.
“In our research, we don’t even care about, Is it ironic? Is it humor? Because extremist content is extremist content, and it’s available,” Winkler said. “It’s really dangerous because it’s part of a normalization process.”
The post This gaming platform has ‘zero tolerance’ for antisemitism. Holocaust reenactments keep reappearing anyway. appeared first on The Forward.
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Remembering Abe Foxman, the longtime ADL leader known as the ‘Jewish pope,’ who always answered my calls
Friday before sundown, I realized that Abe Foxman had not sent me his weekly “Shabbat Shalom” message. For the past seven years, since we began texting regularly about Jewish and political issues, the message would arrive each Friday like clockwork — often accompanied by screenshots of Shabbat memes. My response never changed: “Good Shabbos, tzaddik,” using the Hebrew word for a righteous person that Foxman himself often used.
A few minutes after sundown, I texted him anyway: “Good Shabbos, tzaddik.” Then I turned off my phone. The message showed as “read” Saturday night. But there was no response.
I’m sure I wasn’t the only one waiting for Foxman’s Shabbat greetings. The silence said everything. On Sunday, the Anti-Defamation League announced that its former longtime chief had died at age 86.
I first started texting with Foxman after he stepped down in 2015 as national director of the ADL, concluding a remarkable 50-year run with the organization, including nearly three decades at its helm. By then, he had become one of the most recognizable Jewish communal leaders in America. He was nicknamed the “Jewish Pope.” Former President Barack Obama, a frequent target of Foxman’s criticism over Israel policy, said upon Foxman’s retirement: “Abe is irreplaceable.”
For me, a rookie journalist covering national politics through a Jewish lens, Foxman became an invaluable source. He was in the room with presidents, prime ministers and world leaders during some of the Jewish community’s most consequential moments. Yet he was always available. He answered calls quickly. He texted back. He spoke candidly. He could be sharp, direct and deeply critical when he thought leaders were making mistakes. But he was also compassionate, warm and surprisingly personal.
Every conversation began the same way: asking about me. My kids. How I was holding up. Only then would we get to politics. The conversation would often veer from Yiddish to English and back again.
Our last conversation was on April 15, after a record 40 Senate Democrats voted to block $295 million for the transfer of bulldozers to Israel and 36 of them also supported a measure to block the sale of 1,000-pound bombs to the Jewish state. “A broch,” Foxman replied, using the Yiddish word for disaster. “A sad time for American politics.”
That worldview shaped much of his public commentary in recent years. In interviews with the Forward and other publications, Foxman weighed in on rising antisemitism, campus protests, Democratic divisions over Israel, President Donald Trump’s rhetoric, and the Biden-Netanyahu relationship.
Foxman could be combative and unapologetic. Critics on the left viewed him as too hawkish on Israel, while critics on the right sometimes accused him of being too willing to criticize the Israeli government or American conservatives. But nobody doubted his commitment to the Jewish people and to Israel.
Foxman’s own life story
Born in Baranavichy in 1940, in what is now Belarus, Foxman survived the Holocaust as an infant after being hidden by his Polish Catholic nanny, who baptized him to hide his Jewish identity, while his parents were confined to a ghetto. After the war, he was reunited with his parents, first living in a displaced persons camp in Austria before immigrating to the United States.
Those early experiences shaped the course of his career and ultimately made him one of the most influential Jewish communal leaders of the modern era.
In 1965, after getting degrees from City College of New York and New York University School of Law, Foxman joined the Anti-Defamation League as a legal assistant. Over the next five decades, Foxman rose through the ranks of the organization before being named its national director in 1987, a position he held until 2015.
Under his leadership, the ADL became one of the world’s most prominent voices combating antisemitism and hate.
In 1987, President Ronald Reagan appointed Foxman to serve on the council of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He was reappointed by Presidents George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Joe Biden. He was also vice chairman of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City.
Foxman was often willing to challenge leaders he believed were wrong on Israel, including Democratic presidents he otherwise respected. He was sharply critical of Obama’s approach toward Israel early in his presidency and became one of the leading Jewish voices opposing the administration’s 2009 demand for a freeze on Israeli settlements.
In remarks at Foxman’s farewell dinner in 2015, Susan Rice, former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. and national security advisor under Obama, told the audience: “The thing I most value about Abe is his candor and integrity. He holds everyone to the same high standards, and I can always count on him to tell it to me straight, even when he knows I won’t necessarily like what he has to say.” In 2020, Foxman publicly advocated for Biden to choose Rice as his vice-presidential running mate.
“America and the Jewish people have lost a moral voice, a passionate advocate for the Jewish people and the state of Israel, and a remarkable leader,” Foxman’s successor, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, said in a statement announcing Foxman’s death.
Foxman’s political commentary
Even after retiring from the ADL, Foxman remained a leading voice in Jewish public life, especially after the election of Trump in 2016.
Foxman told me in an interview at the time that the Jewish community should engage with Trump and hold him accountable when needed. He advised Trump to be cautious about making good on his promise to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. He became more critical of Trump after the president said that there were “very fine people on both sides” in response to a 2017 neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
In 2020, Foxman broke his tradition of not endorsing political candidates to back Biden. He argued that Trump was a “demagogue” whose reelection would be a “body blow for our country and our community.”
Once Biden took office, Foxman started to express doubts about the president’s handling of the U.S. relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He said it “sends the wrong message to our friends and enemies” that Israel is being held to a higher standard than other countries in the region. Foxman was also a harsh critic of the Netanyahu government’s judicial overhaul, warning that the right-wing cabinet ministers could hamper support for Israel among American Jews.
In 2024, he warned that Biden’s increasingly harsh rhetoric over Israel’s military campaign in Gaza would repel Jewish voters. “I believe that this administration, because of its political season, is taking American Jews for granted or has written us off,” said Foxman. ”If they’re worried that the Arabs in Michigan will vote with their feet, they need to worry that Jews can also vote with their feet.”
Most recently, Foxman was critical of national Democrats opposing the military operations against the Iranian regime in March for a lack of congressional authority. “Sadly, it is purely political games,” Foxman told me, noting that previous Democratic administrations conducted military operations without explicit congressional authorization. “Ninety-nine percent of Democrats are on record saying Iran is a terrorist state and cannot have nuclear weapons. So why this game?” he asked.
Now, as Jews mark Jewish American Heritage Month, that voice is silent. But for me, and for the many people still waiting for one more “Shabbat Shalom” message from Foxman, he will not soon be forgotten.
Foxman is survived by his wife Golda, his daughters Michelle and Ariel and four grandchildren.
JTA contributed to this article.
The post Remembering Abe Foxman, the longtime ADL leader known as the ‘Jewish pope,’ who always answered my calls appeared first on The Forward.
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Jailed Iranian Peace Laureate Mohammadi Moved to Hospital in Tehran
A picture of Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi on the wall of the Grand Hotel in central Oslo before the Nobel banquet, in connection with the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize 2023, in Oslo, Norway, Dec. 10, 2023. Photo: NTB/Javad Parsa via REUTERS
Iran’s imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi has been moved to a hospital in the capital, Tehran, and has been granted a suspension of her sentence on heavy bail, a foundation run by her family said on Sunday.
Mohammadi, 54, won the prize in 2023 while in prison for a campaign to advance women’s rights and abolish the death penalty. She suffered a heart attack two weeks ago.
Her family had called for her to be transferred from Zanjan, northwest of Tehran, where she was serving her sentence and where she had been initially taken to a hospital, so that she could receive better medical care.
She is now at Tehran Pars Hospital for treatment by her own medical team after being transferred by ambulance, the Narges Mohammadi Foundation said in a statement.
Mohammadi was sentenced to a new prison term of 7-1/2 years, the foundation said in February, weeks before the US and Israel launched their war against Iran. The Nobel committee at the time called on Tehran to free her immediately.
She had been arrested in December after denouncing the death of a lawyer, Khosrow Alikordi. A prosecutor told reporters that she had made provocative remarks at Alikordi’s memorial ceremony.
The foundation gave no details of the bail arrangements or suspension of her sentence.
“However, a suspension is not enough,” it said. “Narges Mohammadi requires permanent, specialized care. We must ensure she never returns to prison.”
Iran shut down most of the internet in the country in January as authorities suppressed mass protests triggered by economic unease. Rights groups have reported ongoing executions of people involved in the unrest.
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Israel’s Attorney General Calls to Cancel Netanyahu’s Mossad Chief Appointment
Israeli Attorney-General Gali Baharav-Miara. Photo: Twitter
i24 News – Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara told the High Court of Justice on Sunday that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to appoint Maj. Gen. Roman Gofman as the next Mossad chief must be canceled.
Baharav-Miara filed her position ahead of a Tuesday hearing on petitions challenging the appointment, telling the court that “substantial flaws” had been found both in the process conducted by the advisory committee and in the conclusions it drew. She said Netanyahu’s decision suffered from “extreme and blatant unreasonableness” and could not stand legally.
At the center of the dispute is the case of Ori Elmakayes, who was a 17-year-old minor when he was activated in 2022 by Division 210, without going through authorized intelligence channels. At the time, the division was commanded by Gofman. Elmakayes was arrested in May 2022 under espionage charges after two officers sent him classified information and told him to post it online as part of an “influence campaign,” despite not being authorized to do so. Gofman initiated this operation. Elmakayes was then held in full detention until July, spending an extended period under electronic monitoring and house arrest before the indictment against him was canceled in late 2023.
Baharav-Miara says Gofman’s involvement in leaking the classified information to the minor, “casts a heavy shadow on Gofman’s integrity and thus on his appointment to head the Mossad.” The attorney general also identified serious procedural failings in the advisory committee’s work. She notes that the majority members signed their opinion before committee chairman and former Supreme Court president Asher Grunis had written his dissent and before two members had reviewed several classified documents significant to the full picture. Grunis concluded that integrity flaws had been found and that it was not appropriate to appoint Gofman as Mossad chief.
The attorney general also says the committee failed to hear directly from Elmakayes or from a relevant senior military intelligence officer, instead relying in part on media interviews.
Netanyahu, who appointed Gofman to head the Mossad starting in early June, for a five-year term, submitted his own response to the court on this past Friday, arguing that the decision fell within his executive authority. The Prime Minister also said that his assessment of the matter was “dozens of times superior” to that of the court, adding that Gofman’s integrity was “found pure,” and describing him as the most qualified candidate.
Other coalition figures responded to the attorney general with sharp criticism, including National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. Ben-Gvir accused Baharav-Miara of fighting the state, while Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said her position was “one step too far” and vowed to advance legislation splitting the attorney general’s role in the Knesset’s summer session.