The Last of Us, Part 2 and the Christian Limits of “Jewish Representation” in Corporate Art

Michael Scrivener, Jewish Representation in British Literature 1780-1840: After Shylock (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) vii + 270 $85. Michael Scrivener's Jewish Representation in British Literature is most encyclopedic study to date depicting Jews and Judaism during Romantic period. Although it was once routine (12) to overlook representations of Jews and works by Jewish writers in literary studies, scholarship on this subject in last twenty years has created a much different critical terrain. Yet, as Scrivener demonstrates, much work remains to be done. The sheer volume of primary texts discussed here that have been little explored, or entirely overlooked, is remarkable. In this way, Jewish Representation in British Literature will be an invaluable sourcebook for further research. Following Freudian psychoanalysis and postcolonial theory, Scrivener's principle analytic rubric revolves around notion of ambivalence. The loci for this ambivalence in this context are stereotypes about Jews; most influential example of this phenomenon, Shakespeare's Shylock, thus expresses Europe's conflicted views on commerce, banking, trade, usury, and capitalism (3). Accordingly, Scrivener devotes much of his argument to discussions of common Jewish character types, with separate chapters on the Pedlar, the Moneylender, and the Jew's Daughter as these types are explored by writers of both genders across a spectrum of religious and political affiliation. Hoe these figures are deployed and interrogated during Romantic period ultimately reflects British anxieties about fact that the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are era of Jewish emancipation (208), a development which in turn necessitates far-reaching changes in understanding of Britishness itself. The focus on stereotypes here looks back to earlier work such as Frank Felsenstein's Anti-Semitic Stereotypes: A Paradigm of Otherness in English Popular Culture, 16601830 (1995) and Michael Ragussis's more recent Theatrical Nation: Jews and Other Outlandish Englishmen in Georgian Britain (2010). Scrivener takes this emphasis in new directions by underscoring inevitably conflicted nature of such representations, whether they are produced by Jewish or non Jewish writers. The dates indicated in title, 1780-1840, are somewhat misleading insofar as, after a summary of recent criticism in first chapter, chapter 2 reviews 17th century debates over readmission of Jews to England during Cromwell's commonwealth. This starting point helpfully allows Scrivener to outline three responses to these debates--support for readmission by a Jewish author and by a Christian one, and open hostility to readmission by another Christian --that set up analytical parameters at work through chapters that follow. The view that Menasseh ben Isreal is the first Anglo-Jewish is, as Scrivener himself observes, debatable, predicated as it is on Menasseh's two-year stay in London and fact that three publications on readmission in English--two of uncertain provenance--bear his name. Menasseh spells out his reasons for seeking English residence in practical as well as spiritual terms; as Scrivener summarizes, writer seeks To worship freely in synagogue; (2) to advance messianic agenda by inserting Jews where there were none; (3) to pursue commerce; (4) to join as biblical Stranger already existing learned and pious community of (31). But even as he counters historic slanders against Jews such as practice of ritual murder, Menasseh ambivalently depends on other aspects of Jewish stereotype in order to argue for readmission. Christian assumptions about predatory Jewish lending are reshaped into a useful knowledge about business; fears of Jewish violence against Christians are recast into a desire for Christian camaraderie. Unfortunately, as Scrivener's analysis demonstrates, this approach did not preclude rhetorical violence in return by anti-readmission pamphleteer William Prynne, whose A Short Demurrer to Jewes Long Discontinued Remitter into England (1655) buttresses virulent Anti-Semitism with meticulous, supposedly historical detail as to specific Jewish crimes. …

My objective is to provide insight into how “Jewishness”, primarily as a cultural signifier, is created in the sitcom Seinfeld and how it is a reflection of contemporary conversations and negotiations of Jewish cultural identity within North America. This kind of research is important because television is still a primary media source despite declining ratings (Marc 1997), and sitcoms are the primary workhorse (and globally distributed) of the TV networks, hence NBC's “Must‐See TV” and the astronomical salaries that top sitcom stars receive. Seinfeld is a breakthrough “Jewish” sitcom (Brook 2003) because it is the first time, since The Goldbergs left the air in the 1950s, that a Jewish lead character is directly defined (Jerry self‐identifies both directly and indirectly) as Jewish. Like Jack Benny and George Burns, he is assimilated, but he is not in the Jewish closet. This historical development is of interest to those who study the shifting nature of race via class in North America, the racing of Jews in particular, and how this racing informs popular TV representations of Jews. However, the sitcom is also notable and fascinating because it engages in the historical network TV practice of Jewish selfcensorship, and it also employs primarily negative stereotypes. The rest of the core and supporting ensemble are ambiguously sketched in terms of ethnicity (not race, I argue they are raced in terms of unmarked whiteness) and they are stereotypical and self‐deprecating. They can be read as Jewish or not Jewish, but there is no direct or clear designation. Jewishness appears as signifiers and coding that can be read as Jewish (food, philosophical references) and possibly Jewish (mannerisms, phenotype, anxiety). Therefore, two more key questions that I address are: Why are only Jewish characters, as opposed to other white ethnics in sitcoms, presented ambiguously? Overall, how does the complex relationship between Jewishness and whiteness shape the Jewish representations in Seinfeld?

Research on players’ reasons for video gaming, their video game preferences, and the behavioural effects of video gaming on the players tends to study those issues separately. This study attempts to explore all those issues collectively with the aim of facilitating game designers to develop appealing educational games for university students without inflicting negative behavioural impacts on the students. Relevant data from 100 undergraduates were collected from an online survey. Cluster analysis of the eight major reasons for playing video games resulted in grouping the respondents into five clusters. The cluster that rated peer effect as the major reason for playing is male-dominated whereas the cluster that rated family influence as the major reason is female-dominated. A similar analysis of the respondents’ video game genre preferences reveals that the cluster favouring fighting and battle games is male-dominated, whereas the cluster favouring family entertainment games is female-dominated. Both genders enjoy playing challenging adventure-strategy games. Most respondents perceived that their cognitive functioning had improved through video gaming, but no conclusion can be drawn as to whether video gaming can improve their social and psychological functioning. Except for poor sleeping habits, most respondents had not experienced any significant negative effects from playing video games. No statistical evidence supports that playing violent video games would induce aggressive behaviours. As games that involve a high demand for players’ motor skills may not be a good choice for educational games and violent games may induce poor sleep quality, it is concluded that challenging adventure games and strategy games are suitable educational game genres for undergraduate students.

On Abrams's The New Jew in Film Carolina Rocha The New Jew in Film: Exploring Jewishness and Judaism in Contemporary Cinema. By Nathan Abrams. New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 2012. 258 pp., ISBN 978-0-8135-5341-2 (pbk). US $25.95. Jewish men and women have been represented by stereotypes in films since the inception of cinema. Heavily influenced by sociopolitical developments in both Europe and the United States, these representations underwent changes throughout the twentieth century. In The New Jew in Film, Nathan Abrams sets out to explore the transformations that Jews have undergone in world cinema since 1990. The book, which is a collection of some previously published articles and book chapters, consists of an introduction and eight chapters. In the introduction Abrams presents a concise background of the portrayal of Jews in American and European films during the twentieth century in order to contextualize his thesis that, since the 1990s, representations of Jews not only have become more prominent in cinema around the world but also have paralleled the assimilation of Jews in different societies as well as their attainment of middle-class status. The author identifies the widespread depiction of Jews in cinema as representing a global trend that has become more noticeable in the last three decades. Abrams also makes the case that this trend is the result of a new generation of actors and actresses, screenwriters, and directors who take pride in their Jewishness. (Here he borrows Daniel Boyarin’s term, “Jewissance,” or [End Page 108] pleasure in being Jewish.) The author argues that many of these new portrayals originate with the Jewish directors, screenwriters, and actors who deploy reverse stereotypes as a way to challenge prevailing perceptions of Jews. This study builds on previous work by Lester Friedman and Patricia Erens, who surveyed Jewish cinematic representations up to the 1980s, and challenges David Desser and Lester Friedman’s assertions from 2004 about the final flowering of American-Jewish cinema (18). Chapter 1 presents a history of the Jew in film, concentrating on two opposing self-images: the tough Jew and the sissy Jew. The latter has been perceived as an image of Jewish passivity, but for Abrams he embodies the new characterizations of Jews in film through the lenses of multiculturalism and pluralism. Furthermore, he argues that new varieties of Jewish masculinities have emerged, including the stoner Jew and the working-class Jew. Such changes are seen, for example, in Woody Allen’s 1990s films, in which the hysterical schlemiel has been replaced by less lovable characters; in David Mamet’s screenplays, which depict sexist and aggressive Jews; and in the Coen brothers’ films. Similarly, European films have also depicted working-class Jews, notably in the work of the French-Jewish director Mathieu Kassovitz. The same images can be found in the comedies of the Jewish-American director Judd Apatow, where Jewish characters assume the roles of badkens (slackers). These new representations of Jews in film have also transformed the penis from a locus of shame to one of comedy, and blatantly critique the values of the dominant Gentile society. The second chapter centers on the depiction of the Jewess in film. Whereas earlier depictions of Jewesses had them relegated to secondary roles as the overbearing Yiddishe momme or the asexual and materialistic Jewish American Princess, Abrams identifies in post-1990s films the “Jewess with attitude,” who evolved from the feminist movement and found expression particularly in the positive Jewish female film roles played by Barbra Streisand. In addition, Jewish female directors presented the feminine Jewish gaze in films such as The Governess (Sandra Goldbacher, 1998). Iconoclastic Jewish female characters also were depicted in Aimée & Jaguar (Max Färberböck, 1999) and Zwartboek (Paul Verhoeven, 2006). The subsequent chapters examine film depictions of Jews in relation to sex, passivity, agency, religion, food, and bathrooms. The fact that Jews and Jewesses are represented as sexual predators, erotic beings, and porn stars is interpreted by Abrams as a sign of a heightened confidence on the part of Jewish and non-Jewish directors to take on these portrayals. The topics of exogamy and endogamy are [End Page 109] also explored, leading...

All four terms in the field of American Jewish children’s literature are much debated by scholars. Should the corpus include only books originally published in America? Is a book Jewish because of the author, the characters, the themes, or something else? Should the corpus include any texts children read, or only texts produced specifically for children? Are pedagogical materials part of “literature?” All of these questions persist and inform how each scholar approaches the field. The first original English-language Jewish children’s books published in America were textbooks and curricular material, beginning with Think and Thank by Samuel Cooper, published by the Jewish Publication Society (JPS) in 1890. Prior to that, Jewish Sunday schools in the early nineteenth century used modified Christian texts, and books imported from England, Europe, and Palestine were available in Yiddish, Hebrew, or English translations. The years between 1890 and 1930 saw intense production of educational children’s materials by Jewish presses including JPS, the Bloch Publishing Company, and Behrman House. The 1935 publication of Sadie Rose Weilerstein’s The Adventures of K’tonton: A Jewish Tom Thumb from the National Women’s League marked a turn from educational texts to stories about contemporary American Jewish children, and the 1951 publication of Sydney Taylor’s All-of-a-Kind Family from the Follett Publishing Company marked the beginning of books with Jewish characters and themes from non-Jewish American presses. Over the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, Jewish publishers continued to produce texts for children, and Jewish representation in books marketed to all children continued to grow. Global networks and PJ Library’s free book program begun in 2005 influenced texts on offer to contemporary American Jewish children, as did the development of a robust Haredi children’s publishing industry around 1980. In line with scholarship on children’s literature more broadly, the first conversations about Jewish children’s books appeared in journals for educators and librarians, moving into discussions of literary criticism in the second half of the twentieth century. Some of the major themes in contemporary scholarship of Jewish children’s literature are the Holocaust; gender roles; antisemitism; and diversity within Jewish representation along axes of race, ethnicity, and practice. Many sources useful for studying this corpus are larger studies of American Judaism or American Jewish literature with only one or two chapters on children’s literature. This trend is shifting now, however, and the field is growing in breadth and depth.

This chapter outlines some historical analogies between Shylock and Othello as a means to measure the distance that separates Shylock, the most famous Jewish role, from Jewish theatre, meaning by that a site where all the complexities of Jewish experience and representation are addressed. author's title plays on the closing moment of Act I when the bond of the pound of flesh has just been sealed and, as Shylock leaves the stage, Antonio comments: The will turn Christian: he grows kind. instant in which the relationship between Jew and Christian appears to be at its most cordial becomes the occasion of an anti-Semitic slur that foreshadows Shylock's final conversion. In reversing that line - The Christian will turn Hebrew - the chapter poses the question of whether the product of an all-Christian culture can ever be converted to Jewishness when transferred from the page to the stage. Keywords: Christian; Hebrew; historical analogies; Jewish theatre; Othello; Shylock

We study definability questions for positional winning strategies in infinite games on graphs. The quest for efficient algorithmic constructions of winning regions and winning strategies in infinite games, in particular parity games, is of importance in many branches of logic and computer science. A closely related, yet different, facet of this problem concerns the definability of winning regions and winning strategies in logical systems such as monadic second-order logic, least fixed-point logic LFP, the modal a#x03BC;-calculus and some of its fragments. While a number of results concerning definability issues for winning regions have been established, so far almost nothing has been known concerning the definability of winning strategies. We make the notion of logical definability of positional winning strategies precise and study systematically the possibility of translations between definitions of winning regions and definitions of winning strategies. We present explicit LFP-definitions for winning strategies in games with relatively simple objectives, such as safety, reach ability, eventual safety (Co-Buchi) and recurrent reach ability (Buchi), and then prove, based on the Stage Comparison Theorem, that winning strategies for any class of parity games with a bounded number of priorities are LFP-definable. For parity games with an unbounded number of priorities, LFP-definitions of winning strategies are provably impossible on arbitrary (finite and infinite) game graphs. On finite game graphs however, this definability problem turns out to be equivalent to the fundamental open question about the algorithmic complexity of parity games. Indeed, based on a general argument about LFP-translations we prove that LFP definable winning strategies on the class of all finite parity games exist if, and only if, parity games can be solved in polynomial time, despite the fact that LFP is, in general, strictly weaker than polynomial time.

Commonly, video games make a clear division on the difficulty offered (e.g. Easy, Medium, Hard), causing that players often do not experience what game designers intended. In this document, we propose a dynamic difficulty adjustment strategy for health point-based video games based on a heuristic evaluation performed at play time. This means that a video game may change its difficulty based on players’ performance while they play. To test our strategy, we implement a fighting video game and perform an evaluation with \(10^{th}\) grade students from Institucion Educativa Multiproposito. Based on our results, the students considered that the game is balanced, suggesting that this strategy is a viable choice to implement and test in other video games.

BackgroundIn recent computerized cognitive training studies, video games have emerged as a promising tool that can benefit cognitive function and well-being. Whereas most video game training studies have used first-person shooter (FPS) action video games, subsequent studies found that older adults dislike this type of game and generally prefer casual video games (CVGs), which are a subtype of video games that are easy to learn and use simple rules and interfaces. Like other video games, CVGs are organized into genres (eg, puzzle games) based on the rule-directed interaction with the game. Importantly, game genre not only influences the ease of interaction and cognitive abilities CVGs demand, but also affects whether older adults are willing to play any particular genre. To date, studies looking at how different CVG genres resonate with older adults are lacking.ObjectiveThe aim of this study was to investigate how much older adults enjoy different CVG genres and how favorably their CVG characteristics are rated.MethodsA total of 16 healthy adults aged 65 years and above playtested 7 CVGs from 4 genres: casual action, puzzle, simulation, and strategy video games. Thereafter, they rated casual game preference and acceptance of casual game characteristics using 4 scales from the Core Elements of the Gaming Experience Questionnaire (CEGEQ). For this, participants rated how much they liked the game (enjoyment), understood the rules of the game (game-play), learned to manipulate the game (control), and make the game their own (ownership).ResultsOverall, enjoyment and acceptance of casual game characteristics was high and significantly above the midpoint of the rating scale for all CVG genres. Mixed model analyses revealed that ratings of enjoyment and casual game characteristics were significantly influenced by CVG genre. Participants’ mean enjoyment of casual puzzle games (mean 0.95 out of 1.00) was significantly higher than that for casual simulation games (mean 0.75 and 0.73). For casual game characteristics, casual puzzle and simulation games were given significantly higher game-play ratings than casual action games. Similarly, participants’ control ratings for casual puzzle games were significantly higher than that for casual action and simulation games. Finally, ownership was rated significantly higher for casual puzzle and strategy games than for casual action games.ConclusionsThe findings of this study show that CVGs have characteristics that are suitable and enjoyable for older adults. In addition, genre was found to influence enjoyment and ratings of CVG characteristics, indicating that puzzle games are particularly easy to understand, learn, and play, and are enjoyable. Future studies should continue exploring the potential of CVG interventions for older adults in improving cognitive function, everyday functioning, and well-being. We see particular potential for CVGs in people suffering from cognitive impairment due to dementia or brain injury.

The aim of our study was to identify the influence of video games on the tolerance expression of the individual. We used Budner's Intolerance of Ambiguity Scale (IAS), V. Boyko's Diagnostics of Communicative Disposition, V. Boyko's Diagnostics of Communicative Tolerance and psychological interviews. The study included two stages. At first stage, we applied Budner's IAS and V. Boyko's Diagnostics of Communicative Tolerance to three groups of respondents: persons who do not play video games (36 respondents), players in strategy games (25 respondents) and players in Real Life Role Play games (RPG) (33 respondents). We surveyed 94 respondents aged 19-27 years, 63 male and 31 female. In the second phase of the study, we used a biographical method and interviewed 16 respondents on the impact of body swap games. Video games with a gender role changing of the player will promote the development of communicative tolerance and tolerance for uncertainty. The differences in the total rate of communicative intolerance we founded to be the lowest in the group of body swap players, but players in strategy games were also more communicatively tolerant than those who had no experience with video games at all. The uncertainty tolerance study found no significant differences in tolerance to the undecidability, we found differences according to the Kruskal-Wallis criterion for three unrelated samples and the significance of differences according to the criteria of complexity and novelty (by p ≤ 0.05). Players in strategy games have the highest tolerance for complexity and novelty, and non-players have the lowest. Men have more causes for gaming (9) than women (6) do. Male players more value the content of a game, and for female players are more important to communicate with other players and the opportunity to try on different skins of the characters.

Jewish theater is a global, ancient, multilingual, and multicultural phenomenon. Scattered examples of Jewish drama and theater can be found in ancient times, but starting in the medieval period, the creation of Jewish plays and productions expanded, as did the involvement of notable Jews in theater more broadly. The Jewish Enlightenment in the 18th century brought about seismic changes in European Jews’ worldview and in their interaction with non-Jews and their involvement in secular cultural production. With that shift came a flowering of Jewish theater and drama, in Jewish languages like Hebrew, Yiddish, and Ladino, and in other European languages like English, French, and German. The late 19th century saw the professionalization and vast expansion of Yiddish theater and drama, a development that was eventually followed by the Hebrew-language stage, which came into its own after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. By that point, other shifts in the Jewish world had reshaped the global map of Jewish theater. Mass emigration and immigration from the 1880s to the 1920s led to the emergence of cities like Moscow and New York as world capitals of Jewish theater, which would also ultimately spread to the Global South, including such cultural centers as Buenos Aires, Melbourne, and Johannesburg. Jewish theater in multiple languages, countries, and styles would flourish in the interwar period, only to be fundamentally reshaped once again by the Holocaust and refashioned after World War II. Regardless of the historical conditions under which they have worked, Jewish playwrights, composers, performers, and other theater artists have played a prominent role in many theatrical cultures. Jewish plays and productions have grappled with all the central themes of the Jewish experience while entertaining and enlightening Jewish and non-Jewish audiences alike.

The research objective of this article is to present the way in which the Jewish Theater in Warsaw has been building its image. To achieve this goal, the case study method was used. The article takes a closer look at the history of the theatre itself, its founder, the legendary actress Ida Kamińska, the troubles with the seat, but most importantly it presents the image transformations that the theatre has been implementing systematically during the time it has been managed by Gołda Tencer. The article was based on the analysis of collected data, Internet searches and author’s observations. The research shows that thanks to the gradual introduction of the rebranding process, the Jewish Theater has gained new audiences, strengthened its image and managed to build a strong brand in the theatre sector.

Doom Guy Comes of Age: Mediating Masculinities in Power Fantasy Video Games

Prise en charge TCC d’une addiction aux jeux vidéo : l’expérience de jeu contribue à la thérapie

<i>Popular Music in the Nostalgia Video Game: The Way It Never Sounded</i>, by Andra Ivănescu