Can your magic amulet save your Jewish village from destruction? Uncover the truth and forge alliances with soldiers, peasants, bandits, ana
So... have I mentioned I'm about to release a 450,000-word Jewish historical fantasy interactive fiction game?
Here's an interview I did with my publisher, Choice of Games, about it.
When I went into Choice of Games’ Jewish shtetl-themed text adventure ‘The Ghost and the Golem’, I expected to do one, maybe two playthroughs and then put it down. I'm now coming up on 10+ playthroughs and I’m still going. Part of this is me being an Achievement hunter, but that alone wouldn't hold my attention; it's the perfectly realised setting and consistently delightful writing that keeps me here. If you've ever read a Sholem Aleichem or Isaac Bashevis Singer translation then you'll be enchanted by how well Benjamin Rosenbaum has captured their very specific style. The narration is laugh-out-loud funny at points and then brutal or spine-tingling at others.
The historical details I recognised made me grin and the ones I didn't made me want to go down a research rabbit hole; which the game enables you to do by coming with a built-in bibliography! Speaking as someone who's already semi-immersed in this historical setting / literature tradition, I have no idea if the sheer amount of details would be alienating or a good jumping-off point for someone who isn't. However, the option to dial up or down the amount of untranslated Yiddish plus the inclusion of a glossary shows that some effort has been put in to make the history accessible to newcomers.
(Somehow even the glossary made me laugh out loud, albeit in the most nerdy way possible. I feel deeply called out, well done.)
The options to play as a queer character (including nonbinary, trans and intersex identities) are both welcome and refreshingly well-integrated into both the setting and the narration. Playing as a nonbinary character on my first playthrough, I was concerned that it might end up being little more than a side-note, or otherwise that it'd interact with the setting in a way that felt inauthentic. But at least for me, there was enough thought put into how a person in this setting might conceive of their own queerness and how others might conceive of it.
Without spoiling the possible endings, it's clear there's a certain set of ending conditions that the game is weighted towards. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, but it becomes clearer over multiple playthroughs. Still, there's been enough variation in the paths to get to the ending that it hasn't lost my interest yet. I expect to stay grabbed by it for a while (or at least until I can get a few more of those farsholtn Achievements!)
Yes, Narrator. I want my little dollops of praise, already. Sue me.
Reading "The Unraveling" by Benjamin Rosenbaum and it's definitely interesting. Especially as someone who has studied gender and sexuality. The world he imagines is very interesting.
It's #Hanukkah! Lets look at some Jewish role playing games to play with the family this holiday season, with offerings from @ben_rosenbaum , @wrestlingbubble and @rileyrethal
Hanukkah sameach!
In 2020, I made a post about role playing games that can be played with dreidels. It came to mind again this year because it started getting a lot of attention as Hanukkah approached, and I realized that I ought to do a follow up. Since that original post, I completed my conversion to Judaism and have become a lot more well versed in table-top role playing games.
Now, there is…
“I was at the Nebulas yesterday. Amal El-Mohtar won Best Novella for The River Has Roots (whee!) and, in her speech, asked us why we are silent about genocide.
Honestly I'm silent here mostly because I can't stand social media and everything is depressing and I just close the tab. But, let's be clear: the Kahanists and Bibi (alongside their frenemies/useful scapegoats in Hamas etc) are still running things in Israel/Palestine, and they have managed to create enough distractions that the rest of the world has gotten exhausted and muddled and mostly moved on, while at home they are plenty loud about "doing a Gaza" in Lebanon (and in Gaza), and encouraging ethnic-cleansing settler violence in the West Bank, and abusing prisoners, and suppressing dissenters.
Don't get me wrong. I am glad there's at least the pretense of an intermittent ceasefire, because it slows things down, and slowing things down is an actual good, and gives some people a better shot. I am not an accelerationist. I do not think it being worse gets us closer to it being better. I am relieved that we're not looking at mass-extinction famine and plague and total depopulation on a time horizon of weeks, which is what we edged up to the border of, a while back.
But "slower-rolled cataclysmic destruction of a people" is not less of a crisis, or less of a crime against humanity. The plan is the same.
And among Israelis, the despair is so great, the fear that the tables will be turned is so pervasive and plausible-seeming, the ideas of a better future so anemic, that "well let them all fuck off elsewhere or die then" is a broadly popular position. Which is not, historically, unusual. Israeli popular opinion on Palestinian lives is not historically anomalous. It is typical of populations which have themselves been brutalized and bamboozled into supporting the destruction of their supposed enemies. It happens in a lot of places, and the fact that it is positioned as such a charged special case here makes it actually more difficult for there to be any kind of collective international effort to resolve it. Antisemitism, for one thing, means that people have a lot of weird special feelings when it's the Jews having the upper hand with the perpetrating, as opposed to, like, the Serbs or the Sinhala or the Hutu or the Turks (or the Chinese or the British or the Americans or the Russians, for that matter, though nobody really ever stops great powers anyway).
But actually the non-antisemitic position is just to use the same criteria for evaluating genocide anywhere. If the Hutu are killing the Tutsi you don't go around attacking Hutu worldwide or claiming that they control the world, you don't justify it on the basis that the Tutsi are also a threat to the Hutu, you don't explain this with some fundamental evil lack on the part of the Hutu, you don't justify it due to the special nature or historical sufferings of the Hutu, you don't deny that the Tutsi might also be a threat to the Hutu; you also, particularly, don't arm the fuck out of the Hutu and egg them on and attack their regional rivals and lie about what's happening. Nor do you act like it's the Hutu who ought to magically and conveniently vanish or subordinate themselves instead. You ought, rather, to just intervene and stop it in the short term, and then bring carrots and sticks and pressure and visibility to support a negotiated solution in the long term. A solution which will actually have Hutu and Tutsi, if not always best buddies, at least actually surviving and having rights. Together.
You ought to keep your eye on the ball, in other words -- which is people not getting fucking murdered and disenfranchised and dispersed, en masse, as opposed to grand historical narratives about originary rights to mythic owernership, or peoplehood, or whatever. You should just be like: humans live here. All the humans are the same. Let's get all the humans safe and free.
But -- as with Rwanda and Bosnia and Northern Ireland -- effective intervention from outside often happens only once Empire has no further use for the conflict. Here, as in many places, it's still in the interests of Empire for atrocities to continue. The subalterns favored (and also demonized) by Empire massacre the subalterns Empire considers disposable (and demonizes even more), and Empire tsk-tsks and chides and blames, and destabilizes and extracts. Divida et impera.
But: there is a way for everyone to live in peace. There is a way for there to be the deep and enduring security of mutual support and solidarity among neighbors, a refusal to be the pawns of the distant powerful and their local stooges. This is possible. It is possible anywhere.
I live, in Switzerland, in a place where Catholics and Protestants fought bitter, murderous wars; I'm a bike ride from Alsace, once a blood-soaked prize clawed back and forth between feuding nations. Now it's boringly peaceful. There is a future in which Tel Aviv and Ramallah and Gaza City and Jerusalem and Beruit are boringly peaceful, and no one is a refugee or starves or cowers, and the conflict and the genocide and the apartheid are things kids are mildly annoyed to have to study about for history exams.
As Amal says, the first step is to acknowledge what is literally (still!) happening now. The other necessary thing, I think, is to articulate what else could be.”
The Unraveling is a far-future comedy of manners and social unrest, in a world half a million years in the future with radically different i
