Can a video game be Jewish? It sounds like the setup to a joke — but it's actually one of the more interesting questions you can ask about contemporary culture.
Millions of people encounter Jewishness for the first time through a screen and a controller. Jewish characters appear in blockbuster games; Jewish history gets dramatized, romanticized, or quietly erased; players are sometimes placed inside moral dilemmas that resonate — knowingly or not — with centuries of Jewish ethical thought. And yet almost nobody is asking what any of this means.
This workshop does. Drawing on ongoing PhD research at the University of Potsdam at the intersection of Jewish education, game studies, and learning sciences, the session explores how contemporary commercial and independent games construct, challenge, and sometimes distort representations of Jewish identity, history, and ethics.
We will look at specific examples, think together about what we find, and explore questions like:

How is Jewishness represented — or conspicuously absent — in popular games?
What does it mean to play a Jewish character, narrative, or ethical position?
Can role-taking in a game foster genuine reflection, or does it risk flattening complexity into stereotype?
And, seriously: can a video game actually be Jewish?

The session combines short visual inputs with guided discussion — no passive lecture, no controllers required. We'll close by reflecting honestly on both the educational potential and the real limitations of bringing video games into Jewish learning spaces.
Whether you're a gamer, an educator, a parent skeptical of screens, or simply curious about where Jewish culture turns up in unexpected places — this one's for you.