When Nazi-Killing Simulators Finally Discovered Jews

For almost half a century, popular, commercial video games have made it the player's task to kill Nazis. Why did Jewish characters not appear as victims, Allied soldiers, or resistance fighters in such games throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, and why did they begin appearing in those roles, suddenly, in the mid-2010s? To explain this phenomenon, Josh Lambert proposes a generic distinction between "serious Holocaust fiction" and Nazisploitation. It was only after Quentin Tarantino’s film Inglourious Basterds (2009) demonstrated that it was possible to center Jewish characters while glorying in sensational Nazisploitation tropes, and to profit and receive acclaim for doing so, that commercial game developers began to include Jews and Jewishness prominently in their Nazi-killing simulators. Examining entries in the Wolfenstein series from 2014, 2015, and 2017, and touching briefly on Call of Duty: WWII (2017), this talk demonstrates Tarantino’s singular and not necessarily salutary influence on video games, and explains one unsettling way that Jewishness figures in the most popular contemporary cultural medium. 

Joshua Lambert is the Sophia Moses Robison Professor of Jewish Studies and English at Wellesley College. As a researcher, he seeks out areas in which Jews and Jewishness played important and understudied roles in the development of U.S. culture, with the aim of helping specialists in Jewish Studies and American Studies, as well as a broader reading audience, understand 19th-, 20th- and 21st-century cultural history in more complex and rigorous ways.

This event is co-presented by the NYU Game Center: https://gamecenter.nyu.edu/