Jewishness and Antisemitism in Video Games

Beginning in the early 1980s, popular, commercial video games made it the player's task to kill Nazis. If these games were inspired by the history of World War 2, why didn't Jewish characters appear in them, whether as victims, as Allied soldiers, or as resistance fighters? And why, after three decades, did Jewish characters suddenly begin appearing in such games, starting in 2014? Josh Lambert argues that there was a rough generic distinction between "serious Holocaust fiction" and entertaining Nazisploitation that game creators understood they could transgress only after seeing the success of Quentin Tarantino’s film Inglourious Basterds (2009). Tarantino showed that one could center Jewish characters while glorying in sensational Nazisploitation tropes, and be applauded for doing so. Examining entries in the Wolfenstein series from the 1980s, 1990s, and 2010s, and touching briefly on Call of Duty: WWII (2017), this talk demonstrates the profound influence of Tarantino's film on the medium of video games, and explains the appearance of Jewish characters as one of its most noteworthy effects.