Pokemon and the Jewish Question
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"What rock and roll was to the youth of the Sixties, gaming is to the youth of today," says Killol Bhuta, brand manager, Ford Motor Company. I guess it must be true, because as someone who was born around the sixties, I like rock and roll - but I just don't get today's obsession with video games.
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Numbers like these indicate that gaming is more than just a pastime - it's a pop culture phenomenon. Just like rock in its time was supposed to evoke the feelings of the age - the Age of Aquarius, that is - video games, as the vehicle of youth culture, give kids (and wannabe kids) their important cultural cues. Even if you don't play games, you can't avoid their influence - more and more movies and TV shows are either based on characters from video games, or look like they might have been plucked out of a game. Which came first, Pokemon as a video game, as a TV show, a movie, or a messy card game? How about The Matrix series? Mortal Kombat? However they started, these and other such games/shows/movies are all pervasive nowadays, and tell you all you need to know about the popular culture.
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Lots of people think that games, with their often excessive violence and gangsta-rap style theme music, reflect a brutalization of society, while others point to the very common themes of fantasy and escapism (Myst, Age of Empires, etc.) in many games as signs of alienation and isolation. Maybe, maybe not; I think you could take a circa 1969 article critical of The Beatles and just replace "John Lennon" with Carl Johnson (of Grand Theft Auto) and get a perfectly up to date "worried adult" critique of the video game phenomenon.
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I have a different question about video games: Is it Good for the Jews?
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Jews, as we know, have been everywhere in popular cultures throughout the ages - and they tend to crop up in the most surprising places. Jews were all the rage when orthodox Catholicism set the tone for popular culture during the dark ages, but even during more secular eras, Jews and Jewish related themes were never far from the surface of cultural doings. Here, for example, is author Herman Melville's take on American "manifest destiny”: "We Americans are the particular, chosen people the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world," (White-Jacket, 1850).
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So it stands to reason that the newest pop culture phenomena would have something to say about Jews, or Jewish themes, as well. Living as we do in an era when enlightened people, like game authors, tend to downplay ethnic, racial and religious issues, it's difficult to find any identifiably Jewish characters in top video games, but Half Life, for example, with a story that takes place in a European style setting and features a place called City 17 (a tribute to the anti-Nazi movie Stalag 17?) has several characters with Jewish sounding names, including Gordon Freeman, Judith Mossman, and Dr. Kleiner, who are all engaged in a fight against a fascist style outfit called the Combine. That Gordon's buddy in this fight is a guy named Calhoun might mean something, like ethnic America (Jews and Irish) struggling against Nazi tyranny during WWII - or it might not.
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And there are plenty more Jewish game references; there's a Golem in Monster Rancher, Nephilim in Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness (among others), a Tower of Babel in Doom (among many others), a guy name "Flinty Stone" in Viewtiful Joe who, according to the Wikipedia, is a "golem like agent who speaks with a Jewish accent (Ashkenazic, Sephardic or Yemenite?)," and others too numerous to mention. The truth is, popular culture is so full of Jewish references that mean one thing in the Jewish world, another in the Christian world, and something else entirely in the pan-global Far Eastern/Pagan flavored New Age humanistic "religion" we have today (Madonna-style Kabbalism is a good example), it's tough to pick out what exactly all these Jewish references mean, if anything.
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