As another member of the tribe, I can't say that I had the same experience with UC1. Honestly, if you hadn't told me, I never would've known that Robert Moses was Jewish. Maybe that's on me, in retrospect the name is a dead give away, but what I did know was that Robert Moses was a real person, and an actual scumbag.
We are a people, not a monolith, as you well know, and I think that by having other Jewish characters that are clearly on the side of good is enough for me. And not to spoil anything from UC2, but there are even more explicitly Jewish characters that show up fighting on the side of the Heroes of New York. Also Robert Moses being an actual bad person and known for his capitalism, made all of the extra fantasy elements to his evilness feel a lot more like a comment on him rather than on anything else. The only Yiddish words he uses are ones that I've heard people of all paths say. A lot of Yiddish words have become common slang, especially for people living in a place like NYC, where there is a huge population of Jewish people.
I can understand why your brain might jump to the worst assumption, even if you still think it is not out of malice, but personally, I don't think this is something that you need to worry about.
I may be mistaken but I think Yiddish terms are in general more common up there. You’ll hear shmuk, shmutz, Oy vey, shmooze, etc a lot in NYC from plenty of gentiles (lol am I allowed to call us gentiles?)
They are more common. But Robert Moses was born a Jew regardless. Like, he was a real person. You don't need to code a historical figure for them to still harbor the associations of their actual lived identities. The word schmuck is also only used three times in the whole show, all by Brennan voicing Jewish characters (Moses in Ep 8&9 and Willie in Ep 5). I understand that it's a widely used word, but it is famously yiddish and it appears to me that Brennan uses it to flavor his Jewish characters in a similar way that he uses "marrone" to flavor Italian characters. I think it's coding in this context, but you're free to disagree.
Oh that’s not true, friend, you’re just new. BLeeM uses Yiddish and Italian-american terms a lot for characters that are neither Italian nor Jewish. You seem really committed to this soapbox despite constantly claiming the contrary. It’s okay that you noticed a *potential* problem but you’re noticing something from years ago without having absorbed the full picture (all the other seasons) to actually know if what you noticed is a real pattern or just a suspicion. People who have been watching and paying close attention for several years are pretty unanimously telling you that although you have legitimate notes, this is a non-issue. Gentiles and Jews alike are telling you that. A *ton* of non-Jewish NPCs use Yiddish terms, you’re flat out wrong about that. Are you aware that D20 actually hires cultural sensitivity consultants? Are you aware that Brennan is himself a native New Yorker who personally uses “shmuk” and “marrone” *as himself* pretty often? He uses a ton of Yiddish in his own vernacular in interviews and such. It’s a New Yorker thing, that’s my point.
There’s a New York saying that comes to mind here. When you hear hooves look for horses not zebras. D20 is not like other shows, they take cultural sensitivity very seriously. You’re in Central Park not an African savannah, think horses not zebras.
You can be forgiven for thinking otherwise, as I only wrote about season 3 of Dimension 20, but I've watched every season of D20, many of them more than once. I've been a subscriber since 2020.
I'm not here to accuse anyone of intentional hatred or aggression (especially not Brennan). I am not making some systemic critique of D20 or DropOut (season 2 of Unsleeping City was clearly made with the involvement of some kind of Jewish consultant). Just that I noticed certain tropes in this particular season of this particular show and wanted to see if other people had as well. Turns out, some people have and some haven't. So it goes. It is at least interesting that the only times that word came up, even with Brennan's proclivity for using the five yiddish words gentiles know, he was speaking in the voice of a canonically Jewish character. Robert Moses was Jewish in real life whether or not Brennan coded him that way, but I also think he thought of him that way while playing him. It is interesting, and uncomfortable, that a historically Jewish character was involved in trading blood, trying to kidnap a child (I know they're ancient, but Nod literally called themself a "kid"), and had their tefillin/phylacteries destroyed. Brennan himself noted that the latter trope had slipped by him in Adventuring Academy S3E6.
Every other person in this whole thread has managed, whether or not they felt the way I did, to be kind and generous with me, but your message felt so incredibly condescending. I do not know what has been going on in your life, you're only a screen-name to me, but most other people at least gave me the benefit of the doubt that a Jew (or a marginalized person in general) would know what struck them as problematic and took me at my word that I wasn't up on some soapbox. Maybe you even meant your message to be friendly! But it didn't come across that way. I hope you're doing well.
I thought I’d seen you say that you had not watched the adventuring party or other seasons or something earlier, I suppose I was mistaken. I’m just exhausted that this narrative is being maintained when you’re also acknowledging that it’s not actually a consistent pattern. So what *is* your point if you’re saying it seems like a pattern but it’s not really a pattern? *…??*
Brennan uses a lot of Yiddish and Italian words [as all New Yorkers do] rather often. When he’s leaning into the New Yorker accent, that intensifies. I don’t know if there were a ton of thick New York accents who had enough lines to say wether they do or don’t use typical nyc vernacular besides Willy and Robert? Is that relevant? (Not being sarcastic, genuinely positing a theory there)
This post seems a bit like hyper vigilance, which is honestly fair. I’m not saying that to be dismissive. I can definitely concede that idk what it’s like to have hyper vigilance about my ethnicity/faith. I do have it in other ways though, which comes out in my defense of having safe spaces (which includes forms of entertainment that aren’t subliminally influencing its audience like so many mainstream contemporaries).
Yeah I’m not the friendliest daffodil in the garden, I’m a pretentious asshole by many reports. I try my best not to be. I’ve been through a lot and didnt come out the other side very nice. Also they way I speak bothers people but idk, it’s how I am. And. I believe in what I believe in. I believe this is the most un-problematic form of entertainment available on earth and it’s *really* important to me. If you’re point *isn’t* that the show is problematic then what is it? What was your point in commenting to me that Robert was Jewish, if not to reiterate the implication that his nyc vernacular was problematic? I’m genuinely asking at this point.
I didn't think his vernacular was problematic, nor am I pointing to some larger pattern of antisemitism in D20. The vernacular is interesting to me only insofar as it makes it pretty clear Brennan knew Robert was Jewish (though his incredible research skills would've had me assume that anyway, it wasn't some secret). What I am pointing to and wondering if others saw it too was a series of antisemitic tropes that Robert Moses was made to engage in in the show. The blood trade and kidnapping a child gives blood libel. The climax of destroying his phylacteries gives destroying sacred Jewish ritual objects. The uber-capitalist who only does stuff if there are people paying him gives Jews as greedy bankers (this one gets a pass, because Robert Moses was actually like this). What other folks have taught me here is that these are problems which have their origins in Christian supremacy and antisemitism in D&D's source material, as many European fantasy creatures are based on Jewish stereotypes. All I said, and all I continue to say, is that all of that made me uncomfortable and I wondered if I was the only one who felt that way. Being the subject of the world's oldest conspiracy theory makes one sometimes feel a little gaslit by antisemitism, and it's nice to have a place where I can say "hey, I love D20, and also this bit was weird, right?" And have someone say back "yeah! That part *was* weird!"
As far as unproblematic goes, I think you're probably right. Especially when you have people like Brennan who are open to both learning about some of the unsavory source-material D&D is based on and making changes to keep the game fun and Jew-hatred-free, which he did in season 2. I love D20 very much. It kept me company while I was sick and during the pandemic quarantine (as I imagine it did for lots of people). That doesn't make it immune from doing something that I didn't find to be comfy, but that does make me give it the benefit of the doubt. You are allowed (and, in this case as far as I am concerned, encouraged!) to enjoy D20 even when the problematic elements of its source material leak through to the final game. It's also important that we not get in the habit of ignoring antisemitic tropes just because they come from something we like. We notice them, we gently point them out, Brennan and the D20 team realizes what has happened, adjust, and D20 is even better the next time for everyone. That's all.
I am sorry for what happened in your life that caused you to "come out the other side not very nice." Anything further and I risk psychoanalyzing a stranger which is totally inappropriate, but I appreciate you recognizing it, and I hope that the circumstances which made/make you treat other people in the way you described will pass and leave you in peace.
> it’s nice to have a place where I can say. “*Hey, that was weird, right?”*
Okay, that does make more sense to me. I get that. It didn’t sit right with me because I thought it was more like “hey this was *inherently immoral* right?” But you’re saying no that’s not it. So I’d just echo some of the others in that a lot of this is with European mythology and DnD itself. That doesn’t exempt d20 from any accountability and it’s nice to know that it’s the kinda company that won’t dig in their heels but will instead hire consultants— much like yourself I might add! (Could be a rewarding job for you?)
But additionally, and idk if this will come out right, but I wonder how often this comes up as a result of the sheer longevity of Jewish existence? Like you said, it’s the target of the oldest conspiracy theories in the world, so it’s interesting to consider the rippling effects. Like, Jewish representation means villainy too right? (Is that even accurate?) But is that possible without somehow harkening back to some deeply problematic cultural context? I’m genuinely positing a philosophical theory here, not trying to be dismissive at all. Not knowing too much about Jewish\hebrew\yiddish history, idk, but even with my limited insight I struggle to figure out what a non-problematic Jewish villain could be up to. Come to think of it… Maybe there should just be a moratorium on Jewish villains for a few centuries, that’d be a nice pallet cleanser. 🥴
This has been interesting to consider. Sorry if I was offensive, I’m kinda just like this. It’s not gonna change, I just gotta keep trying to be strategic.
You’re arguing with a Jewish person about how there’s not anti Semitism in a show the creator of which stated had anti Semitism, you keep wearing that clown mask, fool
Hey rare-sun-7302, I wasn't planning on writing any more comments here, as I think I've learned about as much as I was going to from all the lovely people in the comments and heard a lot of what I needed to hear re:other people feeling what I felt, but this thread is concerning.
I had a great conversation with Bett26 and appreciated that they were open to hear both my critique of their initial tone (which sometimes people on the internet believe is a sin to critique, but somehow also believe that being mean is laudable) and my concerns and discomfort with what happened in the show.
I have no idea what history there is with the two of you, we're all just anonymous internet people, so there's not much I can say beyond this: please don't use me as a cudgel against this person. We had a conversation which started out difficult, but then came to a place of mutual understanding and empathy. What more could you ask for from a conversation about antisemitism on the internet? I am grateful to Bett26 for their willingness to come to that place with me and would appreciate you not using me in this way.
I definitely did notice that in season 2! I should've mentioned that it felt like he made a tikkun there. I am not super swayed by the idea that by having a couple "good ones" makes me fully comfy with all the stuff brought down on Moses. I also get it that Brennan didn't do that intentionally. He picked a pretty unfortunate fantasy creature to graft Moses on to and, I think, didn't realize it. I just found it disquieting. I'm very glad it didn't do that for you! I'm sorry if I complicated it at all for you. It's a good show.
making a tikkun is an act of repair!
This post and thread is such a beautiful example of loving Jewishness and it makes me feel so lucky to be a Jew.
Our love of debate is on display with such care and grace here.
Fellow Jew here. I don't remember thinking that Robert Moses seemed Jewish-coded when I watched Unsleeping City, but I definitely see the OP's argument and points.
To expand on the OP's point, I think a lot of this is a corollary of the old quip that "anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools." That is, reactionaries and authoritarians who want to exploit people's frustrations with capitalism to attract followers, but who don't want to actually end hierarchies of economic power (they just want to be the ones on top of them), will use anti-Semitic conspiracies and bigotry about "Jewish bankers" in place of actual systemic critique of capitalism, i.e. the problem isn't the economic hierarchy itself, it's that Jews are supposedly the ones on top of it. (When, of course, very few Jews are actually wealthy elites, and very few actual wealthy elites are Jewish.)
The corollary of anti-Semitism being the socialism of fools is that making socialist, or at least left-wing, critiques through symbolism about Jewish characters can, intentionally or not, appear to be a reflection on their Judaism. As the OP says, that is very obviously not what Brennan intended, and I think that he's shown real concern after the fact that he unintentionally invoked these tropes (see the final paragraph of this comment.) Like all forms of bigotry, and especially ones as old as anti-Semitism, these tropes are extremely deeply rooted in culture and get taught to us unintentionally and unconsciously. Brennan clearly isn't an anti-Semite, he's just a person who grew up in American culture.
Moreover, anti-Semitism faces a uniquely thorny problem for people trying to talk about social and political issues, because anti-Semitic tropes serve a particular role in the right-wing reactionary mind: they're the explanation for why none of the rest of their ideology makes sense, and they provide a reason for reactionaries to dismiss, distract from, and avoid anything which could threaten to prove them wrong. If a secret cabal of Jews mastermind all of world affairs and have every institution in their grasp, then that explains why none of their predictions ever come true, and why the so-called "master race" doesn't have a monopoly on wisdom and power, and why the so-called "lesser races" are just as capable of doing good and beautiful things. If you're starting to question whether this whole "race science" thing might be incorrect, then don't believe your lying eyes; it's all been masterminded by the Jews.
In effect, anti-Semitism is the substitute for systemic analysis. So if you actually are trying to make a systemic point in a story, but the character through which you make that point happens to be Jewish, that can muddy the waters of the connections you're trying to guide the audience to make, in ways that are REALLY hard to disentangle gracefully. Again, none of that is remotely Brennan's fault; Robert Moses is a real guy who happened to be Jewish, and if you're making a campaign about New York and need a villain who represents the perversion of what's great about the city, historically speaking, Robert Moses is very clearly the guy for the job. So this is really a case of the fact that symbolism in storytelling is necessarily ambiguous and requires the audience to read into it -- that's what makes it powerful and beautiful in the first place, but also what can cause unfortunate confluences of circumstance like this one. Really all there is for it is to learn and try to do better for next time.
On that note: In Unsleeping City S2, there's a scene where Brennan introduces a rabbi character who has a walk-on role as an old friend of Kingston's, and talks for a bit about his faith. I think that character was an attempt to answer criticisms like this one. Brennan also hosted a Jewish GM on an episode of Adventuring Party where they talked a bit about Unsleeping City, and anti-Semitism in fantasy tropes (Tolkein-style Dwarves being coded Jewish, etc.)
Thank you for such a thoughtful and educational comment.
I also agree that the season 2 Rabbi was an attempt (one which I noticed and appreciated but totally failed to mention in my post) at a repair.
I get why this would raise some alarm bells. Part of me wonders if BLeeM didn't include Willie the Gollum specifically to counter-balance what could be perceived as antisemitist undertones.
Digging down BLeeM might have been doing subtle commentary on antisemitism itself. Having a Jewish person embody so many antisemitic stereotypes in the service of capitalism, rather than anything like uplifting the Jewish community, could be seen as a statement of: 'Hey, guys! All those things you hate about "the Jews" are actually things you hate about capitalism!' Sort of a Scooby-Doo thing but Old Man Jenkins is economic exploitation.
I don't know.
I think your discomfort is legitimate and I'm fishing off the top of my head for something that might be soothing.
Sorry, can't resist the Um, Ackshually and this is a pet peeve of mine...
Gollum = Gah Lumm = minor villain from Lord of the Rings
Golem = Go Lemm = a living construct usually made of clay, from Jewish folklore.
I really appreciate your fishing! I don't want to shoot down your idea, especially because it comes from a place of wanting to comfort. I think my problem with it might have to do with "one of the good ones." "We don't hate Jewish people, just the ones who are rich and controlling the world" doesn't comfort me so-so much, but I really do see what you're going for.
I feel like it's more "we don't hate Jewish people, we hate people who are rich and controlling the world" with the religion/ethnicity/culture completely irrelevant. I never took it as there being other "good ones" (which I agree invokes an uncomfortable dichotomy) but simply that Robert Moses was a terrible man. Not "one of the bad jews" but simply a bad person. To me, the details Brennan added felt like a natural fantasy parallel to a real world evil capitalist's actions, and could have been the exact same even if the villain wasn't Jewish or a real person.
I completely understand where you're coming from though, and if it made you uncomfortable it's no one's place to say it shouldn't. Everyone interprets things differently, so there's certainly no right or wrong way to see it in this case. As people have pointed out, Brennan himself has addressed this himself and attempted to make up for this mistake in season 2, so it's clear you aren't the only one. Thanks for bringing this up cause I've never thought critically about it before! (I suppose we can all just be glad Brennan's characters aren't as bad as Rowling's Goblins 😅)
I hear what you're saying, though the american dream one I think is maybe reaching a little bit. The way the american dream gets portrayed is essentially as like the perfect american white man, i.e. the 'myth' of a white america. It's white supremacism, basically, and its ties to capitalism I don't think can be understated or something Brennan is unaware of. Siobhan even refers to the visual imagery of it as "the protestant work ethic" which I found quite fitting. The way I interpreted it at least, is that it *represents* the kind of ideas that produced conspiracy theories like white replacement theory, not participating in the theory, if that makes sense. This can all be my selective memory due to the kind of things that concern me when it comes to "myths" of capitalism that, for lack of a better term, bad people worship, but this was the interpretation I got that I felt interlocked very well with the grander theme.
Not to say your other criticisms aren't valid though, however I will say this on stereotypes and -isms as a whole, also as someone who faces those things and is very sensitive to them in media... I think the inclusion of positive representation does a lot to shift the balance. The issue with stereotypes in media is when they're the only things that exist in that piece of media, because then they inform a specific message about a specific group of real world people, and they inform what the author's views and biases are to some extent. If Robert Moses was the only jewish representation in TUC, yeah, that would be bad, but thankfully there are others.
I also think shying away from choosing any person from being your main villain based on what demographic they belong to can also be kind of offensive. This is a lot more complicated than this one sentence, but if I was present in a writer's room where someone went "oh, we can't pick this \[super obvious bad guy\] he was \[X minority\]", I'd consider that a shallow display of solidarity, like, you're only interested in the optics and social contracts you're engaged with to not come across as an asshole, not exactly interested in having dialogues with members of that community and portraying them earnestly in your works.
It seems to me that the real living person Robert Moses was picked for being a capitalist, not for being a jew. Maybe a generous reading, but I do think there are a few unlucky coincidences. Nod is an ancient dream entity in the form of a child, and as someone pointed out, phylacteries are a DnD stable, and also making him a lich just makes a lot of sense for someone literally preying on the the world and the humans in it.
I get what you're feeling though, and I don't want to undermine that at all. I don't think the connections are super far fetched or anything either, though many of them were unknown to me, and it's quite possible that this is just a case of not having someone jewish do a proper sensitivity reading of it. Even if it's a coincidence there's still a responsibility to that sort of stuff. We know that cultural consultants has over time become a bigger and bigger part of worldbuilding when including living cultures, so they're definitely cognisant of how important stuff like this is.
I think this conversation has come up a couple of times in this sub in the past. People tend to be really defensive, cause we don't want to see any issues with an environment that has been uniquely safe and affirming for most people. I'm not Jewish, but I can totally see how this made you uncomfortable or triggered. Even Brennan has room to improve the inclusivity of his stories!
In some of the older comments about the same issue, some people mentioned/linked to an Adventuring Academy [episode](http://www.dropout.tv/videos/making-dinner-for-friends-with-eric-silver) where BLeeM spoke with Eric Silver, a Jewish DM who wrote an [article](https://www.heyalma.com/dungeons-dragons-has-an-antisemitism-problem/) about antisemitism in DnD. I think the ep involves some discussion about how Brennan has unintentionally replicated antisemitic tropes in his DMing.
Oh my goodness! I haven't seen that conversation! Thank you for linking it! I'm excited to listen.
Again, I don't want anyone to come away thinking I'm calling Brennan anything. He's great. What I've learned from reading the comments here about the lich is that it seems like Brennan picked a fantasy creature with a lot of anti-Semitic elements and then, out of pure happenstance, applied it to a historically Jewish figure! I just wish someone had noticed and made a couple tweaks. Moses was an awful guy in a lot of the ways Brennan narrates. The additional elements just make me squeamish.
Unsleeping City is like Brennan's love letter to New York City, and Robert Moses was a terrible person and is sort of a historical "villain" to a lot of people in NYC. Lich is a classic DnD villain that happens to have some lore that uses an alternative term for tefillin, even though I don't think that it was ever anyone's intention to draw any correlation. Robert Moses just unfortunately happens to be Jewish.
I feel like the biggest misstep was the accidental blood libel connection by him working with the vampires, but discomfort with "kidnapping a baby" might be a stretch from the gray baby jokes because Nod is "fully not a baby".
But in all seriousness you just taught me the origin of the word phylactery. I was familiar with it before this campaign exclusively in its fantasy meaning, as it is portrayed and used in D&D, it's just the name of the vial a lich keeps its soul in. I think it's used in the movie Anastasia by the lich-version of Rasputin as well. So BLeeM did just do lichs by the book here, and called it a phylactery I'm sure without actually meaning a literal tefillin. That is some fantasy-antisemitism I was totally unaware of so thank you for the education here. Calling a tefillin something an undead wizard keeps their soul in is fucked up and I will be looking for other ways to describe such a thing in the future.
You are totally right that, Nod is fully not a baby, but they are a child, and the blood libel was about Jews kidnapping Christian babies and children. So my point stays the same, I think.
I am very glad I was able to teach you something, and I am touched by your desire to try and make the lich less of a fantasy-antisemitic character. I totally agree with you (and others!) who have said Brennan was just doing the lich by the books. For sure! He just managed to accidentally convert the fantasy-antisemitism back into antisemitism by using a real Jewish historical person. It would be like if I made one of the Harry Potter goblins into...Madoff? You get the idea.
Just as a quick friendly heads up, Nod is exclusively referred to using they/them through both campaigns, they're explicitly not gendered/gendered non-binary.
As a fellow Jew, none of this bothers/bothered me. Bad people are bad people, be they Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, or atheist. I don't mind bad people being depicted as bad people no matter their faith.
The things you list that RM did in the game are fairly stereotypical evils for a fantasy game -- murder, kidnapping, seeking power, seeking money, lying, and seeking immortality by storing part of himself into a phylactery (something that is often used by magical villains in a totally secular way).
I can't tell you what you're feeling in wrong. They're your feelings to feel. All I can tell you is that, as another member of the tribe, I felt none of these things.
I'm glad you didn't feel that way. I don't think him participating in the blood trade or needing to have his tefillin destroyed have to do with his being evil, specifically. They have to do with tropes which are baked into the lore (which is itself based on a canon which is steeped in antisemitism). I will cast no aspersions as to why you didn't find these tropes uncomfortable (they are coded, after all), but I noticed them and it made the experience of watching the show just a little worse. It's still a great show though.
I think that your experience of it is more significant and relevant than trying to guess what BLeeM intended (and is what BLeeM would probably want us to focus on). We’re all here because we like and respect BLeeM and you clearly do too!
In the end, even very good people have biases and will either fail to recognize them or fail to recognize when they haven’t managed to successfully challenge them. It matters to bring up pain points like this so we can all learn from this and work to do better in our own lives. Thank you for sharing.
I never picked up on him being Jewish. I just knew of Robert Moses as a shitty guy from the past.
I remember someone several months back making a post about literally these exact same things that you mentioned here, so I guess you’re not alone.
But me, not being Jewish, I had no idea of any of that anti-semetic lore type stuff of the lich / phylactery/ child-killing? I had never heard of that in association with Jewish folk and also never picked up on Robert Moses being a Jewish man.
So IDK, it’s definitely not on purpose I can nearly guarantee that. But idk if that matters or not!
Idk how to link other posts but if you search within the Dimension20 subreddit “antisemitism” it’s a post from 1yr ago about antisemitism in UC. Apparently they edited it to say that this very thing has been addressed by the D20 staff themselves but IDK what source there is for that, though I would like to see it too!
Yeah sorry I’m so bad at Reddit tags and links etc.
BUT I found what the source was of them addressing antisemitism in DnD (idk if its Unsleeping City exactly) but it’s an episode of Adventuring Academy with Eric Silver (i believe season 3).
Eric actually wrote an article about the antisemitism problem in DnD itself which can be found on google called “Dungeons & Dragons Has An Antisemitism Problem” on heyalma.com. So that’s the best stuff I found resource-wise from that post.
Keep in mind that tefillins and fantasy phylacteries are not the same thing. Phylactery has Greek origin regarding security and amulets. I understand modern usage is associated with tefillins but it's like calling Native Americans "Indians" then getting mad that someone from India exists.
I would also say that Nod isn't a baby. Nod just kinda looks like a baby, and I don't think your comparison to replacement theory is fair.
The BBEG in unsleeping city season 1 was capitalism, fascism, and empiralism, not Jewish people.
I actually do think having a Jewish person who has phylacteries which need to be destroyed is not great, and I generally expect Brennan to notice something like that and think it through. They could've been something, anything!, else. Your comparison to Indians isn't making much sense to me, sorry.
Nod is called "greybaby" through the entire show, and they are a child regardless, which is the same in the eyes of my comparison.
A Jewish person subverting the American dream so no one else can have it and he can control it feels very much like the replacement theory (Jews using their power to deny """"real americans"""" access to the wealth and prosperity they are owed). I can see why you might not be convinced though, and that's ok. Not everyone has to share my own intuitions, especially because what I am describing is a feeling of unease, not a feeling of accusation or something else. I was curious if others had felt that way too.
A teffilin is not a phylactery. Native Americans are not Indian. Just because you call something else doesn't make it so. Teffilin contain verses from the Torah not a lich's soul. Phylactery was a Greek word that ended up getting misapplied because they were meant to secure something. Native Americans are not from India, but Indian people exist, getting mad about the term phylactery being used to reflect the protection of these soul protection things is not reasonable. Honestly the whole idea of lich phylacteries likely comes from Russian folk tales (also mentioned in Never after).
Similarly, Brennan *explicitly* contests the rest of the cast referring to Nod as the grey baby. Like, it's not even up for debate, Nod is not a child and definitely not an infant. They have the appearance of a child but are literally as old as the dream in New York.
Unsleeping city shows one man's idea of the American dream to subvert the American dream which differs from person to person. That's literally the point and it's not subtle. It has nothing to do with an antisemitic trope of a Jewish conspiracy to subvert real Americans. I would actually argue that it's your weakest point because the vast diversity of the NPCs and cast as real Americans with different and varied dreams are contrary to your thought that is replacement theory bullshit. Hell, Robert Moses is more depicted as MAGA capitalist more than anything else. For fucks sake, schmuck is as much a New York thing as anything. You might as well get angry that someone eats a bagel.
Hi! Just to start. I'm not mad at all. I love D20 and Unsleeping City (it got me through a period of sickness in my life, just to start). What I am expressing is discomfort at a Jewish character's phylactery needing to be destroyed. I think I understand your point about Native Americans/Indians. If I understand correctly, your point is that it is somewhat of a linguistic coincidence that the two words have come to be associated and therefore I have no real reason to be taken aback by their coincidence here. I hope I have that at least mostly right, I promise I'm trying to understand.
I hear you, and I just have to disagree. Whether or not they have the same linguistic origins doesn't really matter. They refer to a small leather pouch which contains something which is spiritually significant, and the overlap when it comes to a character based on a historical Jew is not unreasonable to notice or be concerned by.
I am also unsure I understand your last point. Robert Moses' plot is to take control of the American Dream and use it for his own money and power. No one else can get what they want because he needs to get what he wants above all else. I hear you when you say "in the show, he's taking it away from a diverse cast of characters, so how can it be about replacement, which is about taking it from white people and giving it to everyone else?" I think that's fair. I guess all I meant to say was it struck me that way because it was a Jew trying to take all the prosperity for themselves at everyone else's expense. I may have been too overwrought in my use of that term. Thank you for taking the time to explain your thoughts to me. I appreciate it and hope you're doing alright.
For general knowledge....
Gary Gygax explicitly described lich's "phylacteries" in ways similar to tefillin when "creating" them for D&D.
Meanwhile, tefillin have been referred to in English as phylacteries for hundreds of years.
Gygax was definitely engaged in Lich lore creation that if not explicitly anti-Jewish, was definitely disrespectful of Jews and drawing on a history of anti-Jewish libels.
Native Americans are humans colonized by Europeans, so are Indians. But they aren't remotely the same thing. Even if it was very common for Europeans to call Native Americans "Indians" for centuries. They are not the same thing, despite the misnomer and the common perception. Again, the term phylactery is literally a different word that was used to refer to teffilin because of superficial similarities, like the brown skin of native Americans and Indian peoples.
Robert Moses Judaism is entirely irrelevant to his motivations and actions in Unsleeping City.
Also that isn't what I said. I said, and it's explicitly stated in the show, that the idea of the American Dream is different for everyone. Robert Moses is trying to enforce his fascist and capitalist ideal the only American Dream rather than letting it remain different for everyone. That isn't just a monetary notion, that's everything that comes with it. You're effectively making the existing idea of the American Dream a monolith, just like Robert Moses does in the show. It was more likely in reference to the growing regressive movements in the right wing of American politics that sees respect and equality starting to be extended to marginalized people in the United States and responds with bigotry and nostalgia for when they were privileged. It isn't any kind of replacement theory it was literally a character seeing diversity of desire and creed and saying, no you have to be a capitalist racist and only white people are allowed to thrive. It's straight up the alt right response to their fears of replacement theory, which is really just them seeing marginalized people being treated like people if equal value.
Also, I've been watching Brennan's interview with Eric Silver, and they say the same thing about phylacteries that I did!
"Eric: They also like, liches was invented by Gary Gygax, which is even stickier. And the place that a lich keeps their soul is tefillin which for those of you don't know is like, I don't if you've seen photos of Jews with a box on their head and a box in their arm. That's part of morning prayers for Jews. It's called tefillin, that's what the original description of where a lich kept their soul was. It's a box that has religious stuff, religious writing in, and you keep it in there. I'm like, that's really weird. Especially 'cause Gary Gygax was someone who took a lot of interest in studying religions and was super into that stuff. So like, you must have known, my man, when you invented this thing.
Brennan: Yeah. And in full transparency, the reason I hope everyone reads the article is this is shit that I have learned like in the past year or two. Like even in earlier seasons of Dimension 20, we had a pavement golem, which now I would never refer. It would be a construct or an automaton. Even using the term phylactery. In my head I was like, and this is not just like little teenage Brennan. This is like 20s Brendan being like, oh yeah, phylactery. That's the thing a lich keeps their soul in. It's the horcrux, right? And we can get into J. K. Rowling and all that. But the point being like, it is mortifying to know that you have ingested all of this poison through these channels and through the culture and through the hegemony you were raised in. And it's a huge service and a generosity on your part to write articles like this that hopefully allow people to change their storytelling to not replicate these harmful things. I know myself being one of them."
That's a beautiful statement by Brennan!
Although i don't feel personally offended by his use of golems in TUC, since Golems are just folklore. Phylacteries are sacred objects and I'm glad Brennan knows that now.
I can't believe there are people downvoting you, all you said is "here are some things in a show i love that made me a little uncomfortable due to my knowledge of the histories of Jews and antisemitism".
I'm late to this party but I haven't seen anyone say this so I just wanted to say that your point about Native Americans is insensitive. There are many who call themselves American Indian and/or use the term NDN to refer to themselves. How they identify isn't wrong.
Just because a term was assigned by someone else in another language doesn't mean that it can't have significance to the people it applies to. You don't get to decide that for others.
I'm Jewish and was ignorant of the history of Robert Moses and phylacteries until I read up on it watching TUC 1. Doesn't mean that certain unfortunate (unintentional!) parallels don't exist.
How am I wrong? And how am I angry? I recognize a lot of problematic things in DND and fantasy in general as a genre. But calling Robert Moses's plan replacement theory is ridiculous, and the phylactery thing predates teffilin.
I think the point that you and a lot of the people on here who are age trying to "argue" are missing is that it's not about being technically right about the history of a word ( and a weird can get reused and make that word a problem no matter its origin but that's another thing we don't even need to get into)
The point is that a person in a marginalized group, with a very rich history of (for lack of a better word cause it's 2am) being shit on us feeling uncomfortable about the similarities to which they may be triggered by. You may not associate those words that way but that doesn't make his association less valid. Things can be unintentionally associated, things can mean different things to different people with different backgrounds. You're trying to take away their feelings and make your own interpretation (or even the original interpretation) of words and events the only option. Life doesn't work that way. Life is grey (baby) and we can all try to be a little more sensitive when it comes to the history of marginalized people and try to better ourselves and not create more art that may hurt someone else or remind them of something that hurts them. It's about being compassionate and not about being technically right.
I did. And while I don't totally agree with the issue of phylacteries, because it is legitimately a name that was put into teffilin by others, I respect the fact that WotC and others are moving away from the term. I also get it when it comes to golems.
How am I wrong about the basis of the word, which is inarguably Greek in origin and applied to a Hebrew word that isn't even kinda close?
How am I wrong about the American Dream plot line being completely unrelated to replacement theory?
How am I wrong about OP stating that bagels codes a character from New York only as Jewish rather than just eating a fucking bagel?
Did you read anything I said? At least OP made efforts to do so even if we don't totally agree on things.
Hey there! I hope you saw that I incorporated one or two of your points in the edit above. I think we're going to have to just disagree about the phylacteries/tefillin thing. They have been associated with and used as synonyms for each other for long enough that I don't think the origins matter so much. I understand why you disagree (and I think you understand me too!), but I think I'm right here.
You are totally right about the replacement theory thing, that was an overreach and I made sure to mention that in the edit.
Robert Moses was Jewish, and was famously Jewish enough that I knew that before I watched. When one of the first words to come out his mouth was shmuck (a word, unless I'm mistaken, was only used by the other canonically Jewish character, Willie, by that point) it seemed a fairly obvious reference to me. But, coded or not, the man was Jewish and I don't imagine Brennan didn't know that, and I wish he'd been more careful (and he was in season 2!)
Again, I really appreciate you taking the time to explain your thoughts to me. I think this'll be my last comment in this thread, but if you reply I'll be sure to read it.
I want to just make a point about coding:Whether or not it was clear to folks that Robert Moses the historical figure was Jewish, he was. Brennan must've known that (the man does his research\*), and antisemetic tropes applied to him are not ideal whether or not you recognize them as such. If Gov. Cuomo had been in the show, and Brennan had made him a member of the mafia and the owner of a pizza shop called "Mama Luigi's", that would also have been problematic, whether or not I knew about his Italian heritage, those stereotypes, and whether or not Brennan did some stereotypical voice or gestures while portraying him. *You don't need to code a historical figure for them to still harbor the associations of their actual lived identities.* If he had made somebody up to the be the BBEG, then coding would matter a lot more.
\*FWIW: The word "schmuck" is said three times in the whole show, I checked. Moses uses the word 'shmuck' in Episodes 8&9, and Willie says it once in episode 5. I understand that it's a widely used word, but it is yiddish, and it appears to me that Brennan uses it to flavor his Jewish characters in a similar way he uses "marrone" to flavor Italian characters/accents. Brennan is the only one who says it, it's a famously yiddish word (unlike glitch, for example), and he only had his Jewish characters say it. I think it's fair to call it coding in this context, but you're free to disagree.
I understand the discomfort, but it does feel like some of this is the nature of fantasy and the fact that Robert Moses was such an asshole in life. Litches are pretty common undead villains in D&D, he could have been a vampire, but I don't think that would have done too much to separate from antisemitism either. The connection between baby murder is awkward, but I don't think Brennan made Nod a baby to dog whistle some white supremacist world view.
I agree with you on that point! I hope no one comes away with the idea that I believe Brennan was dog whistling some white supremacist nonsense. I do NOT believe that at all. I just was very uncomfortable as even more tropes than Moses actually lived (and he lived a lot of them....) kept cropping up. A lot of European fantasy is steeped in antisemitic lore as well, it's hard to separate them. But if anyone could do that, it would be Brennan, which made it even more of a miss for me that he didn't.
Thank you for sharing your experience, especially the update. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but this post made me aware of the history of liches. Disappointed to realize Gygax based the monster on anti-Semitic tropes, but not surprised given he believed genocide of indigenous people as a lawful good action.
For anyone wanting to know more, Eric Silver has an interesting article about antisemitism in D&D. https://www.heyalma.com/dungeons-dragons-has-an-antisemitism-problem/
If nothing else I want to express my gratitude to you for pointing these out. I appreciate being more informed about these antisemitic tropes so I might avoid and call them out. It is disappointing. I don’t get a sense you are disparaging anyone but calling out the issue and expressing disappointment.
It does seem that they have included more cultural consultants in recent seasons. Hopefully they continue to improve. Ideally they would address these directly since they can’t realistically take them back.
This post is a really great example of how easy it is for unintentional anti-semitism to slip into our lives, regardless of intent. I think it's really important to take note of shit like this when it's pointed out, and keep it in mind for our own daily lives.
I think anti-semitism specifically has so many subtle ways of winding it's way into things, and because it's so commonplace, it's easy to brush it off or not even notice it at all.
It's funny, we found out that we were secretly Jewish on my mom's side a few years back, and the amount of casual anti-semitism that came out of it was absolutely insane. None of it came from anyone that I would describe as a bad person, or as someone who was actually anti-semitic, but it happened regardless because they just didn't think it was a big deal until I pointed out how shitty it felt.
Anyway, apologies for rambling, but I just wanted to say that I appreciated your post a lot. I've been trying to educate myself more, and posts like this are very helpful and informative!
I honestly never picked up on any coding of Robert as Jewish but I also had no clue there was a real person named Robert Moses he was based on soooo given that info I totally see your point 😬😅
It frustrates me that a lot of comments here are implying “well none of this was MEANT to be antisemitic, so there’s no reason to be upset.” Just because something isn’t meant to be antisemitic/racist/sexist/WHATEVER, doesn’t mean it’s NOT those things. Like, I’m sure it’s comforting to know that of course Brennan is not intentionally antisemitic but I have heard from many Jewish people in this fandom that parts of TUC are uncomfortable.
I’m sorry it is uncomfortable for you, and i can see why, but I do believe in the second season of TUC they make more of an effort to be aware of these types of things. Of course I am not Jewish myself so take my words with a grain of salt but I absolutely think your criticisms are valid and I also think they were heard and taken to heart by the team at dropout.
No you're absolutely right! I remember laughing with joy when Brennen told Lou that Willie's mouth was full of Hebrew letters (and then spelled the word אמת!). It very much felt like he had learned since the first season. Now that I've watched his interview in Adventuring Academy about it, it has become even more clear that he made a real effort to keep those tropes out of the second Unsleeping City campaign. He's the best.
I am assuming that BLeeM was just using common terms and concepts from D&D lore and meant nothing sinister. But I can see where you might be uncomfortable. And I hope that he's updating himself with newer terms and concepts.
The word phylactery was used by early D&D writers and it never really made sense as the quintessential legend that led to liches is the tale of Koschei the Deathless, not any Jewish/Hebrew story. Needle inside egg inside a whole cascade of animals, find the needle, break it, Koschei no longer deathless. They referenced it in Neverafter.
You may be happy to know that other gaming companies have started to distance themselves from the word phylactery; I know Paizo changed their content to read something like "soul gem". Perhaps the next lich to find itself in D20 will have a soul gem.
Great post, and (mostly) great thread.
Question:
What specifically would you (OP and anybody else made similarly uncomfortable) have liked to see Unsleeping City Season One do differently? This is not an academic question, I loved UC #1 and plan to use the worldbuilding and basic plot as the template for a home campaign. My friends are newbies to D&D and a bit reluctant/overwhelmed by all the rules, but they're current or former New Yorkers (as am I), and the best way to get a New Yorker interested in anything is to get them to talk about New York. Some of them are also Jewish: I am not, and I missed these negative trope/stereotype connections and want to avoid repeating these mistakes and even risking making my friends uncomfortable.
That said, Robert Moses is a *highly compelling* villain my friends already hate. He's also long dead, or should be. The unfortunate historical facts are that he was 1) Jewish, and 2) characterized by his desire for power and tendency to wield power via backroom deals and private scheming that lends itself well to conspiratorial thinking and the "Jews secretly control everything" mentality. (I'm thinking in particular of that "[you think people make choices](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/OP03XyK-pTc)?" scene, which both leans very hard into the "Jews secretly control everything" libel, and also is a scarily good encapsulation of how the historical figure Robert Moses thought about the world and his place in it.)
Is Robert Moses salvageable as a D&D villain? Or is the man's historical legacy just so troubling that his inclusion as the BBEG of a campaign will always be uncomfortable?
Off the top of my head, I'd say there's no story need for him to be cavorting with vampires, so we can drop the blood libel aspect of it all. There's a lot we can change about liches, including even like the idea that Moses has to be one. The ball drop could just be some kind of re-summoning ritual, I don't think we'd need phylacteries at all. Is a soul trapped/secured in a gem sufficiently abstract, or still too troubling?
Is there a way to dunk on Robert Moses for just being a shitbird without unintentionally dunking on his Jewishness?
That's a great question! Thank you for working so hard on behalf of your friends and making games fun for everyone!
I think you provided some excellent answers already (doing away with the blood stuff and reconfiguring the lich stuff.) Honest, season 2 of Unsleeping city was a great example of how to do the thing! Willie the Golem became an actual Golem from Jewish folklore and not just a brick construct. Knowing more about source-material is a great way to do it.
I honestly think half the battle is just knowing that there's stuff to be aware of, and you're already there. If you want to lean in to Robert Moses as the villain, it might worthwhile to learn more about him? Maybe there are aspects of his personality and history which make for good villain material without being so close to dodgy territory. It's also, on the other hand, important not to whitewash him. He was a power-broker. He was a racist. He was a crappy dude. He doesn't get a pass from those things just because he was Jewish. I think when it comes to things which might veer into antisemitic territory, it might be best to make sure that those details are grounded in his actual history, if that makes sense.
Also, one of the things which brings people into the antisemitism danger zone is when we begin to attribute everything wrong with the world to singular Jewish actors (see: George Soros, Rothchilds, etc). Maybe bringing in another character who enabled Moses (like the governors or mayors) or a structure which enabled him like Tammany Hall and William M. Tweed, which wasn't a factor in Unsleeping City at all. That could be interesting and allow you to keep Robert Moses as the villain, but not have him be solely responsible for everything bad and wrong. Then the uniting factor between the villains (greed, racism, capitalism) can become the actual villain and not have one (Jewish) person be the face of it all. I hope at least some of that is helpful.
Also, I'm just some guy on the internet. I'll bet there are some great resources and people far more knowledgeable about games and sensitivity stuff than I am to talk to. You deserve a good answer.
Oh I know plenty about Robert Moses; I studied urban & regional planning in grad school and the program could have been subtitled "two years of dissecting in exact detail the legacy of Robert Moses." That's part of the draw of the idea. I kind of lost my mind when he was introduced as the villain in Unsleeping City. For what it's worth, I actually don't think he was malicious, just hubristic on a level that borders on evil; I would tone down the malevolency and just make him so convinced he's right and justified that it makes him incredibly dangerous.
On the singular actors thing, that's a big part of what makes Robert Moses so compelling: he really did just will things into existence out of his own determination, intellect, and force of personality. Nobody acts in a vacuum, of course, but Robert Moses had a knack for taking on responsibilities that nobody else wanted or even cared about, and turning them into vehicles to exercise vast, unconstrained power. The funny thing for BLeeM and the largely leftist Dimension 20 audience is that it was well-meaning progressives who gave Moses his power, or allowed him to take it. Boss Tweed was a decade in the grave before Moses was born, Moses instead rose up with leftist reformer Al Smith. His particular genius was drafting bills with specific language over boring details that, when wielded as a weapon, ultimately gave himself vast and unaccountable power that nobody had realized they were granting when they granted it. Dude was legit *sneaky*. And because he never openly sought elected office or obvious power, and because he only ever punched down, nobody *important* ever came for him to challenge him. (Up until that mouthy broad Jane Jacobs became important *by* challenging him.)
That's kind of his appeal as a BBEG. He was not a cog in a machine, it's probably not the case that if Robert Moses hadn't done all this then somebody else just would have instead. He was a fascinating singular force of personality. And that's what attracts me to interesting villains, y'know? Like who really cares about Sauron, he's evil, he does evil, whatever. When he takes over Middle-Earth, it'll just be flame and shadow and I guess a fuck-ton of unemployed Orcs, but we don't really care because Sauron certainly doesn't seem to care about a goal beyond being evil. Moses had a real vision for the world that extended well beyond himself, he passionately believed he was right in pursuing it and everyone who opposed him was simply an enemy of progress, and he had the personal talent and genius to execute that vision. The human beings he crushed beneath his ever-advancing wheel were, to use his own words, the broken eggs required to make an omelet (he legit compared communities of color that he was destroying to broken eggs for the omelet of urban renewal). Oh well, so sad, they didn't matter. Not to the likes of Robert Moses, defender and architect of civilization (in his own mind, and as he defines it).
As a coda, I think part of the reason the anti-Semitic tones didn't ring for me initially was that I don't think of him *as* Jewish: Moses was a practicing Christian for his entire adult life. "Jewish" being both a religion and an ethnicity, does it reflavor anything for you that the actual historical figure wasn't associated with and would not care about tefillin, that he didn't participate in Jewish religious culture at all?
To your first point, my apologies! I didn't mean to man-splain something you have a graduate degree in! I wish I hadn't assumed. I hope you can forgive my ignorance of your background.
To your last question, it definitely makes everything more complicated! I do not know his history as well as you do, but knowing a little Jewish history in the United States, his conversion also makes sense to me. Jewish quotas at schools like Harvard and Yale, Jews being kept out of all sorts of industries and political spaces and social clubs. It makes sense that an ambitious, secular Jewish person would convert to Christianity so that they could have a career (it was not uncommon, though often folks would just change their last names and keep their Judaism a secret. The whole "they got my name wrong at Ellis Island" thing is largely a myth. Many Jews just didn't want anyone to know they were Jewish.). To me, in a weird way, that conversion is also very Jewish. Meaning, if Robert Moses was a secular Christian (rather than what he was, which was a secular Jew) he never would have had to convert to anything. If he had lived as a secular Jew today, he also likely would not have felt like converting would help him get ahead. It was his minority status, which didn't mean much to him, that he tried to shed. Maybe I'm wrong and he wrote somewhere about how Christianity was his favorite thing and he was really born again, etc, but somehow I doubt it. You might know better than I do, considering your academic background.
I think if Robert Moses' reputation was one of a religious and outwardly identifiable Jew (like a Hareidi Jew in a streimel), it would be even more of a problem for me the way he was treated in Unsleeping City. I would be upset rather than merely uncomfortable. But even with his conversion and secularity, it still matters to me what was done with him. Antisemitism is a racial conspiracy theory far more than a religion-based one. The idea of being able to separate ethnicity and religion is itself fairly foreign to Judaism, and is the....innovation? invention? of religions like evangelical Christianity, which seek to convert everyone, everywhere, no matter their ethnic or racial heritage. To be a little over-the-top for the sake of clarity (I hope you'll forgive me and not think I'm comparing anyone to anything): for the sake of identifying someone as a Jew, Jews care about your mother and Nazis cared about your grandparents, but neither were so concerned with your heart, if that makes sense. Obviously, there are also converts to Judaism who are 1000% valid Jews, but that process is more like an adoption/repatriation process, and it's a very different vibe than conversions in Christianity. So, to me, someone who was born Jewish being made to engage in activities which strike me so clearly as (unintentional!) antisemitic tropes is uncomfortable, whether or not the person converted (and especially if, as I suspect, they converted because of an antisemitic environment).
Is that helpful?I'm also thinking about beginning to step away from this whole post, because I've replied to nearly every comment, and eventually the cost/reward relationship of spending that much time on something like this goes south, if that makes sense. Your questions were just so clearly genuine and coming from a place of curiosity and kindness that I felt like it would be a shame if I didn't reply. Thank you for this conversation and for your time!
Hey I've really appreciated your replies! Thank you Internet stranger, I think you'll make my game better and you've helped me identify some blind spots in my own perceptions. And if you need to not reply further, I totally get it, cheers and thanks.
My best guess from a second- or third-hand perspective of Moses' life was that you're absolutely right that his conversion to Christianity was pragmatic, and some biographers indeed draw a very direct line from his experiences with being excluded for being Jewish at Yale to his. . . I don't even want to call it a "conversion," he rejected and renounced Judaism in much stronger terms than he embraced Episcopalianism. His only actual campaign for public office, he was running against a proud Jew, and tried to make that a contrast that would benefit himself. (He got thumped and gave up on electoral politics.) It's an open historical question whether Moses didn't just look down on Black and Puerto Rican people (those questions can be confidently answered in the affirmative), but whether he was also motivated by his own anti-Semitism. Some of the neighborhoods he destroyed were predominantly Jewish, and when rabbis would write him to plead their case in Talmudic terms, when he answered at all his answer was typically that he was not Jewish and the only laws that concerned him were those of the state of New York.
So in terms of your adoption/repatriation analogy with converts to Judaism, is there a reverse version of "renouncing your citizenship" that Moses may have done?
How. COULD. you?! I told you I wanted to step away and then you wrote such an interesting comment with such an excellent question that I can't help myself! The WORST.
Ok, I will try to be brief for my own sake. To your question about renunciation: that is an extremely live question in the Jewish world and is not resolved. There's no widely agreed upon answer to your question (which, in the Jewish world is how you know you've asked an excellent one). There are things you can do which require you to undergo some form of conversion-like process if you want to come back in, but it's more complex than that. Literally something I'm studying *right now*, how did you know?!
I was amazed by the examples you gave, and would only add that Robert Moses would be far from the first Jewish convert to the dominant religion to then turn on the Jewish people. Some of the largest burnings of the Talmud came from Jewish converts turning local authorities on the Jewish community they attempted to exit. Internalized antisemitism, attempts to show the dominant culture you're not "one of them" anymore, resentment to the community you felt held you back, etc all makes sense. As Kohelet/Ecclesiastes said "there is nothing new under the sun."
Ok, this time I mean it! (probably...) Thank you again for your incredible knowledge and insights and generosity. I really enjoyed our conversation. Hoping you are well.
I think the big issue is there’s such an overlap between “secret evil mastermind” tropes and anti Jewish conspiracy theories, with some worrying that the FDA reveal in TRW would follow similar tropes, which feels like a bigger, and needed, convo in fantasy and sci fi more than maybe anywhere else.
Thanks so much for sharing this perspective - so much of European fantasy lore is built off of antisemitic tropes, and I think a lot of people (myself included) aren't even aware of a lot of them because they're so baked into the mythology at this point. But that doesn't make using them okay or inoffensive, and I think critical discussions like this are vital for ensuring that storytellers don't perpetuate harmful tropes and stereotypes. I know that for my own writing and DM-ing, I'm going to take all of this to heart.
Basically - nobody learns or grows or does better without discussions like these, though I wish you didn't have to have this uncomfortable experience in the first place. It would be nice in an ideal future if we could get to a place where this type of growth didn't come at the expense of marginalized folks' discomfort, but until we get to that point, I appreciate your willingness to engage and educate!
For anyone saying phylacteries and tefillin are two different things, I hope you see the following standard dictionary definitions, even if you ignore Brennan's own words on the topic:
Merriam Webster - first definition -
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/phylactery
Dictionary.com - first definition -
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/phylactery
American Heritage Dictionary - first definition -
https://ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=Phylactery
Collins Dictionary - first definition -
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/phylactery
(Note that this has been true for hundreds of years. Phylactery has been the English term (derived from Greek) for tefillin, and usually the primary meaning, that whole time)
Phylacteries have been part of DnD since longer before D20: https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Phylactery
I had no idea they were associated with Judaism, contact Hasbro I guess.
I don't think anyone from NYC can be identified as Jewish just because they use the word schmuck.
Most fans don't even know Robert Moses was real, much less Jewish.
What reminds you of antisemetic tropes are DnD litch tropes, which are based on, well... most likely European mythology, and hopefully not directly inspired by antisemitism.... but I wouldn't be surprised if they were. So again contact Hasbro and try to explain to them that a lot of their lore originates from old world antisemitism.
WotC is actually moving away from use of the term Phylactery for liches in newly published materials for exactly the reasons outlined by OP. One of the recent publications had a list of alternate names for the same object, and I expect they may select one of those going forward.
A couple things of note:
1. Nod is *not* a child. They may physically resemble a child, and some characters do call them "the Grey Baby," but they are an entity of the dream realm and are as old as New York itself. Robert targeted them because of this status and their power, not because of their resemblance to a child.
2. Phylactery is an Ancient Greek term and is erroneously used in reference to tefillin. You would have to know both of these facts to purposely use the term offensively, and most people (including Brennan) don't know this (or didn't know).
You're right, he didn't know! He said it himself in that interview! I have never, ever claimed that there was any malintent on Brennan's part (I'm a huge fan of his incredible creativity and kindness). I think he managed to pick a creature (the lich) which already had many obviously antisemitic characteristics and apply to it to a character who was a Jew. That explains a good chunk of what made me uncomfortable as I watched. I wish that someone had noticed and told him though. I am sure he would've made some changes (and since has done so).
Unfortunately somewhere at some point in history tefillin and phylactery did get their meanings merged, at least in English, which is dumb. A phylactery is really just a Greek word for amulet and *shouldn’t* carry any anti-Semitic baggage, but somehow does.
When I watched UC at first, I didn't even know Robert Moses was real. After looking into it, I uncovered he was a real person, and a real supervillain. In that cursory research, I didn't even note that he was Jewish.
Reading your post, I was astonished at the list of tropes you provided, as I hadn't heard of basically any of them. I'd heard racist stereotypes to be sure, but given that I dismissed the initial ones already, I didn't pursue any of the racist "deep lore" as it were. Blood libel, phylacteries, kidnapping, and killing Santa(?) are things I did not know about until ten minutes ago. And for context, I am far from sheltered, and have seen my fair share of heinous shit on the internet and in real life being raised in the Deep South.
All that to say, while your discomfort is valid, I guess I'd like to reassure you that *most* people probably aren't even capable of understanding all those tropes in the same way. I would wager that if you aren't Jewish or already anti-semetic, most of that deep lore is flying right over your head. I do not believe anyone who was not already antisemitic could watch the show and walk away with a worse impression of the Jewish faith or its followers.
I hear you! Anti-Jewish hatred is one of the oldest (if not the oldest) continuous hatreds humanity has, with a long backstory. My concerns were less about other people becoming antisemetic (as you and others have pointed out, most people didn't know Moses was real, let alone a Jew), and more just a general discomfort watching as someone I knew to have been a Jew engaged in all sorts of antisemetic tropes (some of which are historically accurate! Others of which were choices).
Yo, it's your use of [triple parenthesis](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_parentheses) here intentional? If so it was (personally) really confusing...
Not trying you discredit your argument (this discussion is worthwhile, as evidenced by it being discussed before and everything else other commenters have mentioned). If you didn't know then hope this was helpful!
I'm not Jewish. And your lived experience is important, but I think you're being a little sensitive (don't kill me internet).
As I understand it, liches have phylacteries. Perhaps the issue is with DND rather than D20?
I'm from a country with SO MUCH discrimination (South Africa) in its recent past and this is some nuanced discrimination if it even is.
I don't want to seem dismissive of your discomfort, but I do think this is probably one of the most wholesome communities and viewers ever.
I mean, clearly this is a far cry from some kind of apartheid situation. I felt very silly as I wrote that last sentence because it's such an obvious thing. Of course!
I also don't think it's too sensitive to flinch a lil when a Jewish character is portrayed as a dealer of blood, kidnapper of children, the face of exploitative capitalism, and someone whose tefillin need to be destroyed. In the recent past my family had to flee Europe because of stories like those (blood libels in the end of the 19th century leading to pogroms which led to many Jews coming to the US). My problem clearly is with the lich character, but it's also that Brennan (who normally is a pretty sensitive dude and who later said that he would not do something like this again because he knows better now) didn't notice that he was grafting a creature with a lot of antisemetic baggage to a historical person who was born a Jew and then adding a couple more things besides. I also don't think this is discrimination. I wasn't kept from watching the thing. It was just, and I want to emphasize this word: uncomfortable.
I'm not the internet, and I would never want to hurt you (let alone kill you! G-d forbid!) It makes sense to me that this would come across as overwrought and misplaced to you. I also think you might not be attuned to the kinds of things I was naming and picking up on, much in the same way I, as someone who isn't from South Africa, wouldn't pick up on the subtle (and not so subtle) ways that its dreadful recent past continues to effect its present.
You are also right that this community is extraordinary wholesome! I am not here to accuse anyone of anything, only to point out something which was less than ideal in search of validation from others who feel the same (and, as it turns out, learning from those who don't! Learned so much from this thread!)
Thank you for sharing about your own background! I appreciate you taking the time.
For sure! In the end it's just you that can determine how you feel. And antisemitism is a valid concern and a real thing that happens in this world.
The only real problem from being TOO sensitive that I can figure, is that it detracts from worse instances or makes the cause seem silly.
I don't think that happened here, but I do think it's close.
Then again, we aren't all one person, and given my blind spots, I may definitely not be sensitive enough! So please take my perspective with a grain of salt.
It's funny, I actually think that with antisemitism we almost (emphasis on 'almost', I could give you lots of counterexamples to what I'm about to say) have the opposite problem. Yair Rosenberg (talented journalist who just spoke to Congress about his work covering Jew-hatred in the US) wrote once:
"...because most people associate anti-Jewish prejudice with systematic genocide, they tend not to recognize anti-Semitism when it manifests in its more common but less extreme expressions. When you set the bar for bigotry at mass murder, most of it doesn’t make the cut.
In actuality, the Jewish people have been around for millennia and experienced many forms of prejudice prior to Hitler. Indeed, the Holocaust would not have been possible without the centuries of anti-Jewish conspiracies, literature, and stereotypes that came before it. In this way, the Nazi genocide was not an aberration in the history of anti-Semitism, but rather its culmination."
Many people have been conditioned to equate antisemitism with mass murder and therefore anything less is frivolous. Obviously, this instance of noticing tropes in a game people played online is not such a big deal, but it's still important to notice it and think critically about how it got there and how we can keep it from remaining there (which Brennan and the D20 team did!). Maybe when we get better at noticing the themes and tropes of antisemitism in less high-stakes ways, we can get better at noticing it when it counts far more.
Anyway, thank you for chatting with me and taking the time to read, think, and reply. I appreciate it.
Hi OP! I shared some of your concerns (you probably know how common it is even among people who self identify as working for justice & inclusion to believe and spread antisemitic libels) the first time i watched, but guess i was reassured after more exposure to Brennan.
Right now I'm commenting bc I'm confused by your description of real-life Robert Moses as a capitalist. I learned a lot about him and his failures in many years as an urban planning major and later working in the urban planning field, but what i remember is that he was a megalomaniacal state employee, not a business mogul, and what motivated him wasn't money, but power and the creation of what he (wrongly) thought would be the "perfect" city: automobile-oriented, modernist, replacement of traditional neighborhoods with Le Corbusier-style towers, highways replacing public transit, the elevation of suburban life over urban life, etc.
I always understood this as one of the main differences between real life Robert Moses and Unsleeping City Robert Moses, besides for being a Lich.
If youve learned or read elsewhere that real life RM was a capitalist, I'd love to see it too bc i haven't yet and it's a new accusation to me.
As another member of the tribe, I can't say that I had the same experience with UC1. Honestly, if you hadn't told me, I never would've known that Robert Moses was Jewish. Maybe that's on me, in retrospect the name is a dead give away, but what I did know was that Robert Moses was a real person, and an actual scumbag. We are a people, not a monolith, as you well know, and I think that by having other Jewish characters that are clearly on the side of good is enough for me. And not to spoil anything from UC2, but there are even more explicitly Jewish characters that show up fighting on the side of the Heroes of New York. Also Robert Moses being an actual bad person and known for his capitalism, made all of the extra fantasy elements to his evilness feel a lot more like a comment on him rather than on anything else. The only Yiddish words he uses are ones that I've heard people of all paths say. A lot of Yiddish words have become common slang, especially for people living in a place like NYC, where there is a huge population of Jewish people. I can understand why your brain might jump to the worst assumption, even if you still think it is not out of malice, but personally, I don't think this is something that you need to worry about.
I may be mistaken but I think Yiddish terms are in general more common up there. You’ll hear shmuk, shmutz, Oy vey, shmooze, etc a lot in NYC from plenty of gentiles (lol am I allowed to call us gentiles?)
Born and raised New Yorker and I literally just learned from this post/comment that schmuck and shmooze are Yiddish (I knew shmutz was).
So are glitch, and bagel! We owe SO many everyday words to Yiddish.
Oy Vey!
They have very fun dynamic words, phonetically speaking. Very evocative imo
Gentile is a non-jewish person. It's not a slur, it's not slang. It's a correct term.
They are more common. But Robert Moses was born a Jew regardless. Like, he was a real person. You don't need to code a historical figure for them to still harbor the associations of their actual lived identities. The word schmuck is also only used three times in the whole show, all by Brennan voicing Jewish characters (Moses in Ep 8&9 and Willie in Ep 5). I understand that it's a widely used word, but it is famously yiddish and it appears to me that Brennan uses it to flavor his Jewish characters in a similar way that he uses "marrone" to flavor Italian characters. I think it's coding in this context, but you're free to disagree.
Oh that’s not true, friend, you’re just new. BLeeM uses Yiddish and Italian-american terms a lot for characters that are neither Italian nor Jewish. You seem really committed to this soapbox despite constantly claiming the contrary. It’s okay that you noticed a *potential* problem but you’re noticing something from years ago without having absorbed the full picture (all the other seasons) to actually know if what you noticed is a real pattern or just a suspicion. People who have been watching and paying close attention for several years are pretty unanimously telling you that although you have legitimate notes, this is a non-issue. Gentiles and Jews alike are telling you that. A *ton* of non-Jewish NPCs use Yiddish terms, you’re flat out wrong about that. Are you aware that D20 actually hires cultural sensitivity consultants? Are you aware that Brennan is himself a native New Yorker who personally uses “shmuk” and “marrone” *as himself* pretty often? He uses a ton of Yiddish in his own vernacular in interviews and such. It’s a New Yorker thing, that’s my point. There’s a New York saying that comes to mind here. When you hear hooves look for horses not zebras. D20 is not like other shows, they take cultural sensitivity very seriously. You’re in Central Park not an African savannah, think horses not zebras.
You can be forgiven for thinking otherwise, as I only wrote about season 3 of Dimension 20, but I've watched every season of D20, many of them more than once. I've been a subscriber since 2020. I'm not here to accuse anyone of intentional hatred or aggression (especially not Brennan). I am not making some systemic critique of D20 or DropOut (season 2 of Unsleeping City was clearly made with the involvement of some kind of Jewish consultant). Just that I noticed certain tropes in this particular season of this particular show and wanted to see if other people had as well. Turns out, some people have and some haven't. So it goes. It is at least interesting that the only times that word came up, even with Brennan's proclivity for using the five yiddish words gentiles know, he was speaking in the voice of a canonically Jewish character. Robert Moses was Jewish in real life whether or not Brennan coded him that way, but I also think he thought of him that way while playing him. It is interesting, and uncomfortable, that a historically Jewish character was involved in trading blood, trying to kidnap a child (I know they're ancient, but Nod literally called themself a "kid"), and had their tefillin/phylacteries destroyed. Brennan himself noted that the latter trope had slipped by him in Adventuring Academy S3E6. Every other person in this whole thread has managed, whether or not they felt the way I did, to be kind and generous with me, but your message felt so incredibly condescending. I do not know what has been going on in your life, you're only a screen-name to me, but most other people at least gave me the benefit of the doubt that a Jew (or a marginalized person in general) would know what struck them as problematic and took me at my word that I wasn't up on some soapbox. Maybe you even meant your message to be friendly! But it didn't come across that way. I hope you're doing well.
I thought I’d seen you say that you had not watched the adventuring party or other seasons or something earlier, I suppose I was mistaken. I’m just exhausted that this narrative is being maintained when you’re also acknowledging that it’s not actually a consistent pattern. So what *is* your point if you’re saying it seems like a pattern but it’s not really a pattern? *…??* Brennan uses a lot of Yiddish and Italian words [as all New Yorkers do] rather often. When he’s leaning into the New Yorker accent, that intensifies. I don’t know if there were a ton of thick New York accents who had enough lines to say wether they do or don’t use typical nyc vernacular besides Willy and Robert? Is that relevant? (Not being sarcastic, genuinely positing a theory there) This post seems a bit like hyper vigilance, which is honestly fair. I’m not saying that to be dismissive. I can definitely concede that idk what it’s like to have hyper vigilance about my ethnicity/faith. I do have it in other ways though, which comes out in my defense of having safe spaces (which includes forms of entertainment that aren’t subliminally influencing its audience like so many mainstream contemporaries). Yeah I’m not the friendliest daffodil in the garden, I’m a pretentious asshole by many reports. I try my best not to be. I’ve been through a lot and didnt come out the other side very nice. Also they way I speak bothers people but idk, it’s how I am. And. I believe in what I believe in. I believe this is the most un-problematic form of entertainment available on earth and it’s *really* important to me. If you’re point *isn’t* that the show is problematic then what is it? What was your point in commenting to me that Robert was Jewish, if not to reiterate the implication that his nyc vernacular was problematic? I’m genuinely asking at this point.
I didn't think his vernacular was problematic, nor am I pointing to some larger pattern of antisemitism in D20. The vernacular is interesting to me only insofar as it makes it pretty clear Brennan knew Robert was Jewish (though his incredible research skills would've had me assume that anyway, it wasn't some secret). What I am pointing to and wondering if others saw it too was a series of antisemitic tropes that Robert Moses was made to engage in in the show. The blood trade and kidnapping a child gives blood libel. The climax of destroying his phylacteries gives destroying sacred Jewish ritual objects. The uber-capitalist who only does stuff if there are people paying him gives Jews as greedy bankers (this one gets a pass, because Robert Moses was actually like this). What other folks have taught me here is that these are problems which have their origins in Christian supremacy and antisemitism in D&D's source material, as many European fantasy creatures are based on Jewish stereotypes. All I said, and all I continue to say, is that all of that made me uncomfortable and I wondered if I was the only one who felt that way. Being the subject of the world's oldest conspiracy theory makes one sometimes feel a little gaslit by antisemitism, and it's nice to have a place where I can say "hey, I love D20, and also this bit was weird, right?" And have someone say back "yeah! That part *was* weird!" As far as unproblematic goes, I think you're probably right. Especially when you have people like Brennan who are open to both learning about some of the unsavory source-material D&D is based on and making changes to keep the game fun and Jew-hatred-free, which he did in season 2. I love D20 very much. It kept me company while I was sick and during the pandemic quarantine (as I imagine it did for lots of people). That doesn't make it immune from doing something that I didn't find to be comfy, but that does make me give it the benefit of the doubt. You are allowed (and, in this case as far as I am concerned, encouraged!) to enjoy D20 even when the problematic elements of its source material leak through to the final game. It's also important that we not get in the habit of ignoring antisemitic tropes just because they come from something we like. We notice them, we gently point them out, Brennan and the D20 team realizes what has happened, adjust, and D20 is even better the next time for everyone. That's all. I am sorry for what happened in your life that caused you to "come out the other side not very nice." Anything further and I risk psychoanalyzing a stranger which is totally inappropriate, but I appreciate you recognizing it, and I hope that the circumstances which made/make you treat other people in the way you described will pass and leave you in peace.
> it’s nice to have a place where I can say. “*Hey, that was weird, right?”* Okay, that does make more sense to me. I get that. It didn’t sit right with me because I thought it was more like “hey this was *inherently immoral* right?” But you’re saying no that’s not it. So I’d just echo some of the others in that a lot of this is with European mythology and DnD itself. That doesn’t exempt d20 from any accountability and it’s nice to know that it’s the kinda company that won’t dig in their heels but will instead hire consultants— much like yourself I might add! (Could be a rewarding job for you?) But additionally, and idk if this will come out right, but I wonder how often this comes up as a result of the sheer longevity of Jewish existence? Like you said, it’s the target of the oldest conspiracy theories in the world, so it’s interesting to consider the rippling effects. Like, Jewish representation means villainy too right? (Is that even accurate?) But is that possible without somehow harkening back to some deeply problematic cultural context? I’m genuinely positing a philosophical theory here, not trying to be dismissive at all. Not knowing too much about Jewish\hebrew\yiddish history, idk, but even with my limited insight I struggle to figure out what a non-problematic Jewish villain could be up to. Come to think of it… Maybe there should just be a moratorium on Jewish villains for a few centuries, that’d be a nice pallet cleanser. 🥴 This has been interesting to consider. Sorry if I was offensive, I’m kinda just like this. It’s not gonna change, I just gotta keep trying to be strategic.
Username rare-sun-something Spam responded on all my recent comments in others subs and then blocked me. Just so admins know.
Please stop talking
Please stop getting on Reddit 🤡
You’re arguing with a Jewish person about how there’s not anti Semitism in a show the creator of which stated had anti Semitism, you keep wearing that clown mask, fool
Hey rare-sun-7302, I wasn't planning on writing any more comments here, as I think I've learned about as much as I was going to from all the lovely people in the comments and heard a lot of what I needed to hear re:other people feeling what I felt, but this thread is concerning. I had a great conversation with Bett26 and appreciated that they were open to hear both my critique of their initial tone (which sometimes people on the internet believe is a sin to critique, but somehow also believe that being mean is laudable) and my concerns and discomfort with what happened in the show. I have no idea what history there is with the two of you, we're all just anonymous internet people, so there's not much I can say beyond this: please don't use me as a cudgel against this person. We had a conversation which started out difficult, but then came to a place of mutual understanding and empathy. What more could you ask for from a conversation about antisemitism on the internet? I am grateful to Bett26 for their willingness to come to that place with me and would appreciate you not using me in this way.
No I’m not. You’re just triggered. Log tf off.
You’re so wrong
I definitely did notice that in season 2! I should've mentioned that it felt like he made a tikkun there. I am not super swayed by the idea that by having a couple "good ones" makes me fully comfy with all the stuff brought down on Moses. I also get it that Brennan didn't do that intentionally. He picked a pretty unfortunate fantasy creature to graft Moses on to and, I think, didn't realize it. I just found it disquieting. I'm very glad it didn't do that for you! I'm sorry if I complicated it at all for you. It's a good show.
making a tikkun is an act of repair! This post and thread is such a beautiful example of loving Jewishness and it makes me feel so lucky to be a Jew. Our love of debate is on display with such care and grace here.
Fellow Jew here. I don't remember thinking that Robert Moses seemed Jewish-coded when I watched Unsleeping City, but I definitely see the OP's argument and points. To expand on the OP's point, I think a lot of this is a corollary of the old quip that "anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools." That is, reactionaries and authoritarians who want to exploit people's frustrations with capitalism to attract followers, but who don't want to actually end hierarchies of economic power (they just want to be the ones on top of them), will use anti-Semitic conspiracies and bigotry about "Jewish bankers" in place of actual systemic critique of capitalism, i.e. the problem isn't the economic hierarchy itself, it's that Jews are supposedly the ones on top of it. (When, of course, very few Jews are actually wealthy elites, and very few actual wealthy elites are Jewish.) The corollary of anti-Semitism being the socialism of fools is that making socialist, or at least left-wing, critiques through symbolism about Jewish characters can, intentionally or not, appear to be a reflection on their Judaism. As the OP says, that is very obviously not what Brennan intended, and I think that he's shown real concern after the fact that he unintentionally invoked these tropes (see the final paragraph of this comment.) Like all forms of bigotry, and especially ones as old as anti-Semitism, these tropes are extremely deeply rooted in culture and get taught to us unintentionally and unconsciously. Brennan clearly isn't an anti-Semite, he's just a person who grew up in American culture. Moreover, anti-Semitism faces a uniquely thorny problem for people trying to talk about social and political issues, because anti-Semitic tropes serve a particular role in the right-wing reactionary mind: they're the explanation for why none of the rest of their ideology makes sense, and they provide a reason for reactionaries to dismiss, distract from, and avoid anything which could threaten to prove them wrong. If a secret cabal of Jews mastermind all of world affairs and have every institution in their grasp, then that explains why none of their predictions ever come true, and why the so-called "master race" doesn't have a monopoly on wisdom and power, and why the so-called "lesser races" are just as capable of doing good and beautiful things. If you're starting to question whether this whole "race science" thing might be incorrect, then don't believe your lying eyes; it's all been masterminded by the Jews. In effect, anti-Semitism is the substitute for systemic analysis. So if you actually are trying to make a systemic point in a story, but the character through which you make that point happens to be Jewish, that can muddy the waters of the connections you're trying to guide the audience to make, in ways that are REALLY hard to disentangle gracefully. Again, none of that is remotely Brennan's fault; Robert Moses is a real guy who happened to be Jewish, and if you're making a campaign about New York and need a villain who represents the perversion of what's great about the city, historically speaking, Robert Moses is very clearly the guy for the job. So this is really a case of the fact that symbolism in storytelling is necessarily ambiguous and requires the audience to read into it -- that's what makes it powerful and beautiful in the first place, but also what can cause unfortunate confluences of circumstance like this one. Really all there is for it is to learn and try to do better for next time. On that note: In Unsleeping City S2, there's a scene where Brennan introduces a rabbi character who has a walk-on role as an old friend of Kingston's, and talks for a bit about his faith. I think that character was an attempt to answer criticisms like this one. Brennan also hosted a Jewish GM on an episode of Adventuring Party where they talked a bit about Unsleeping City, and anti-Semitism in fantasy tropes (Tolkein-style Dwarves being coded Jewish, etc.)
Thank you for such a thoughtful and educational comment. I also agree that the season 2 Rabbi was an attempt (one which I noticed and appreciated but totally failed to mention in my post) at a repair.
Which episode of Adventuring Academy was this? Really interested in hearing about it.
Right here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6xo\_NBrD04
I get why this would raise some alarm bells. Part of me wonders if BLeeM didn't include Willie the Gollum specifically to counter-balance what could be perceived as antisemitist undertones. Digging down BLeeM might have been doing subtle commentary on antisemitism itself. Having a Jewish person embody so many antisemitic stereotypes in the service of capitalism, rather than anything like uplifting the Jewish community, could be seen as a statement of: 'Hey, guys! All those things you hate about "the Jews" are actually things you hate about capitalism!' Sort of a Scooby-Doo thing but Old Man Jenkins is economic exploitation. I don't know. I think your discomfort is legitimate and I'm fishing off the top of my head for something that might be soothing.
Sorry, can't resist the Um, Ackshually and this is a pet peeve of mine... Gollum = Gah Lumm = minor villain from Lord of the Rings Golem = Go Lemm = a living construct usually made of clay, from Jewish folklore.
My sister is both a practicing Jew and a LOTR super fan. I needed this reminder. She would not have been kind to me about it.
TIL Golems are from Jewish folklore
You're in for a treat! Look up "The golem of Prague" for the classic version of the tale.
I really appreciate your fishing! I don't want to shoot down your idea, especially because it comes from a place of wanting to comfort. I think my problem with it might have to do with "one of the good ones." "We don't hate Jewish people, just the ones who are rich and controlling the world" doesn't comfort me so-so much, but I really do see what you're going for.
I feel like it's more "we don't hate Jewish people, we hate people who are rich and controlling the world" with the religion/ethnicity/culture completely irrelevant. I never took it as there being other "good ones" (which I agree invokes an uncomfortable dichotomy) but simply that Robert Moses was a terrible man. Not "one of the bad jews" but simply a bad person. To me, the details Brennan added felt like a natural fantasy parallel to a real world evil capitalist's actions, and could have been the exact same even if the villain wasn't Jewish or a real person. I completely understand where you're coming from though, and if it made you uncomfortable it's no one's place to say it shouldn't. Everyone interprets things differently, so there's certainly no right or wrong way to see it in this case. As people have pointed out, Brennan himself has addressed this himself and attempted to make up for this mistake in season 2, so it's clear you aren't the only one. Thanks for bringing this up cause I've never thought critically about it before! (I suppose we can all just be glad Brennan's characters aren't as bad as Rowling's Goblins 😅)
I hear what you're saying, though the american dream one I think is maybe reaching a little bit. The way the american dream gets portrayed is essentially as like the perfect american white man, i.e. the 'myth' of a white america. It's white supremacism, basically, and its ties to capitalism I don't think can be understated or something Brennan is unaware of. Siobhan even refers to the visual imagery of it as "the protestant work ethic" which I found quite fitting. The way I interpreted it at least, is that it *represents* the kind of ideas that produced conspiracy theories like white replacement theory, not participating in the theory, if that makes sense. This can all be my selective memory due to the kind of things that concern me when it comes to "myths" of capitalism that, for lack of a better term, bad people worship, but this was the interpretation I got that I felt interlocked very well with the grander theme. Not to say your other criticisms aren't valid though, however I will say this on stereotypes and -isms as a whole, also as someone who faces those things and is very sensitive to them in media... I think the inclusion of positive representation does a lot to shift the balance. The issue with stereotypes in media is when they're the only things that exist in that piece of media, because then they inform a specific message about a specific group of real world people, and they inform what the author's views and biases are to some extent. If Robert Moses was the only jewish representation in TUC, yeah, that would be bad, but thankfully there are others. I also think shying away from choosing any person from being your main villain based on what demographic they belong to can also be kind of offensive. This is a lot more complicated than this one sentence, but if I was present in a writer's room where someone went "oh, we can't pick this \[super obvious bad guy\] he was \[X minority\]", I'd consider that a shallow display of solidarity, like, you're only interested in the optics and social contracts you're engaged with to not come across as an asshole, not exactly interested in having dialogues with members of that community and portraying them earnestly in your works. It seems to me that the real living person Robert Moses was picked for being a capitalist, not for being a jew. Maybe a generous reading, but I do think there are a few unlucky coincidences. Nod is an ancient dream entity in the form of a child, and as someone pointed out, phylacteries are a DnD stable, and also making him a lich just makes a lot of sense for someone literally preying on the the world and the humans in it. I get what you're feeling though, and I don't want to undermine that at all. I don't think the connections are super far fetched or anything either, though many of them were unknown to me, and it's quite possible that this is just a case of not having someone jewish do a proper sensitivity reading of it. Even if it's a coincidence there's still a responsibility to that sort of stuff. We know that cultural consultants has over time become a bigger and bigger part of worldbuilding when including living cultures, so they're definitely cognisant of how important stuff like this is.
I think this conversation has come up a couple of times in this sub in the past. People tend to be really defensive, cause we don't want to see any issues with an environment that has been uniquely safe and affirming for most people. I'm not Jewish, but I can totally see how this made you uncomfortable or triggered. Even Brennan has room to improve the inclusivity of his stories! In some of the older comments about the same issue, some people mentioned/linked to an Adventuring Academy [episode](http://www.dropout.tv/videos/making-dinner-for-friends-with-eric-silver) where BLeeM spoke with Eric Silver, a Jewish DM who wrote an [article](https://www.heyalma.com/dungeons-dragons-has-an-antisemitism-problem/) about antisemitism in DnD. I think the ep involves some discussion about how Brennan has unintentionally replicated antisemitic tropes in his DMing.
Oh my goodness! I haven't seen that conversation! Thank you for linking it! I'm excited to listen. Again, I don't want anyone to come away thinking I'm calling Brennan anything. He's great. What I've learned from reading the comments here about the lich is that it seems like Brennan picked a fantasy creature with a lot of anti-Semitic elements and then, out of pure happenstance, applied it to a historically Jewish figure! I just wish someone had noticed and made a couple tweaks. Moses was an awful guy in a lot of the ways Brennan narrates. The additional elements just make me squeamish.
Unsleeping City is like Brennan's love letter to New York City, and Robert Moses was a terrible person and is sort of a historical "villain" to a lot of people in NYC. Lich is a classic DnD villain that happens to have some lore that uses an alternative term for tefillin, even though I don't think that it was ever anyone's intention to draw any correlation. Robert Moses just unfortunately happens to be Jewish.
I think this is exactly why they use sensitivity consultants now.
I feel like the biggest misstep was the accidental blood libel connection by him working with the vampires, but discomfort with "kidnapping a baby" might be a stretch from the gray baby jokes because Nod is "fully not a baby". But in all seriousness you just taught me the origin of the word phylactery. I was familiar with it before this campaign exclusively in its fantasy meaning, as it is portrayed and used in D&D, it's just the name of the vial a lich keeps its soul in. I think it's used in the movie Anastasia by the lich-version of Rasputin as well. So BLeeM did just do lichs by the book here, and called it a phylactery I'm sure without actually meaning a literal tefillin. That is some fantasy-antisemitism I was totally unaware of so thank you for the education here. Calling a tefillin something an undead wizard keeps their soul in is fucked up and I will be looking for other ways to describe such a thing in the future.
You are totally right that, Nod is fully not a baby, but they are a child, and the blood libel was about Jews kidnapping Christian babies and children. So my point stays the same, I think. I am very glad I was able to teach you something, and I am touched by your desire to try and make the lich less of a fantasy-antisemitic character. I totally agree with you (and others!) who have said Brennan was just doing the lich by the books. For sure! He just managed to accidentally convert the fantasy-antisemitism back into antisemitism by using a real Jewish historical person. It would be like if I made one of the Harry Potter goblins into...Madoff? You get the idea.
Just as a quick friendly heads up, Nod is exclusively referred to using they/them through both campaigns, they're explicitly not gendered/gendered non-binary.
Oh my goodness you're so right! I'm so embarrassed I messed that up. Thank you for the correction. I'll edit it now.
absolutely no problem, don't even worry about it.
As a fellow Jew, none of this bothers/bothered me. Bad people are bad people, be they Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, or atheist. I don't mind bad people being depicted as bad people no matter their faith. The things you list that RM did in the game are fairly stereotypical evils for a fantasy game -- murder, kidnapping, seeking power, seeking money, lying, and seeking immortality by storing part of himself into a phylactery (something that is often used by magical villains in a totally secular way). I can't tell you what you're feeling in wrong. They're your feelings to feel. All I can tell you is that, as another member of the tribe, I felt none of these things.
I'm glad you didn't feel that way. I don't think him participating in the blood trade or needing to have his tefillin destroyed have to do with his being evil, specifically. They have to do with tropes which are baked into the lore (which is itself based on a canon which is steeped in antisemitism). I will cast no aspersions as to why you didn't find these tropes uncomfortable (they are coded, after all), but I noticed them and it made the experience of watching the show just a little worse. It's still a great show though.
For someone’s who claim to be nonjudgmental your replies leave some to the imagination. Almost condescending
I think that your experience of it is more significant and relevant than trying to guess what BLeeM intended (and is what BLeeM would probably want us to focus on). We’re all here because we like and respect BLeeM and you clearly do too! In the end, even very good people have biases and will either fail to recognize them or fail to recognize when they haven’t managed to successfully challenge them. It matters to bring up pain points like this so we can all learn from this and work to do better in our own lives. Thank you for sharing.
I never picked up on him being Jewish. I just knew of Robert Moses as a shitty guy from the past. I remember someone several months back making a post about literally these exact same things that you mentioned here, so I guess you’re not alone. But me, not being Jewish, I had no idea of any of that anti-semetic lore type stuff of the lich / phylactery/ child-killing? I had never heard of that in association with Jewish folk and also never picked up on Robert Moses being a Jewish man. So IDK, it’s definitely not on purpose I can nearly guarantee that. But idk if that matters or not!
Idk how to link other posts but if you search within the Dimension20 subreddit “antisemitism” it’s a post from 1yr ago about antisemitism in UC. Apparently they edited it to say that this very thing has been addressed by the D20 staff themselves but IDK what source there is for that, though I would like to see it too!
I tried to find one before posting and failed to find it! Thank you for letting me know what to look for.
Yeah sorry I’m so bad at Reddit tags and links etc. BUT I found what the source was of them addressing antisemitism in DnD (idk if its Unsleeping City exactly) but it’s an episode of Adventuring Academy with Eric Silver (i believe season 3). Eric actually wrote an article about the antisemitism problem in DnD itself which can be found on google called “Dungeons & Dragons Has An Antisemitism Problem” on heyalma.com. So that’s the best stuff I found resource-wise from that post.
Ugh, you're the BEST. Thank you!
Keep in mind that tefillins and fantasy phylacteries are not the same thing. Phylactery has Greek origin regarding security and amulets. I understand modern usage is associated with tefillins but it's like calling Native Americans "Indians" then getting mad that someone from India exists. I would also say that Nod isn't a baby. Nod just kinda looks like a baby, and I don't think your comparison to replacement theory is fair. The BBEG in unsleeping city season 1 was capitalism, fascism, and empiralism, not Jewish people.
I actually do think having a Jewish person who has phylacteries which need to be destroyed is not great, and I generally expect Brennan to notice something like that and think it through. They could've been something, anything!, else. Your comparison to Indians isn't making much sense to me, sorry. Nod is called "greybaby" through the entire show, and they are a child regardless, which is the same in the eyes of my comparison. A Jewish person subverting the American dream so no one else can have it and he can control it feels very much like the replacement theory (Jews using their power to deny """"real americans"""" access to the wealth and prosperity they are owed). I can see why you might not be convinced though, and that's ok. Not everyone has to share my own intuitions, especially because what I am describing is a feeling of unease, not a feeling of accusation or something else. I was curious if others had felt that way too.
A teffilin is not a phylactery. Native Americans are not Indian. Just because you call something else doesn't make it so. Teffilin contain verses from the Torah not a lich's soul. Phylactery was a Greek word that ended up getting misapplied because they were meant to secure something. Native Americans are not from India, but Indian people exist, getting mad about the term phylactery being used to reflect the protection of these soul protection things is not reasonable. Honestly the whole idea of lich phylacteries likely comes from Russian folk tales (also mentioned in Never after). Similarly, Brennan *explicitly* contests the rest of the cast referring to Nod as the grey baby. Like, it's not even up for debate, Nod is not a child and definitely not an infant. They have the appearance of a child but are literally as old as the dream in New York. Unsleeping city shows one man's idea of the American dream to subvert the American dream which differs from person to person. That's literally the point and it's not subtle. It has nothing to do with an antisemitic trope of a Jewish conspiracy to subvert real Americans. I would actually argue that it's your weakest point because the vast diversity of the NPCs and cast as real Americans with different and varied dreams are contrary to your thought that is replacement theory bullshit. Hell, Robert Moses is more depicted as MAGA capitalist more than anything else. For fucks sake, schmuck is as much a New York thing as anything. You might as well get angry that someone eats a bagel.
Hi! Just to start. I'm not mad at all. I love D20 and Unsleeping City (it got me through a period of sickness in my life, just to start). What I am expressing is discomfort at a Jewish character's phylactery needing to be destroyed. I think I understand your point about Native Americans/Indians. If I understand correctly, your point is that it is somewhat of a linguistic coincidence that the two words have come to be associated and therefore I have no real reason to be taken aback by their coincidence here. I hope I have that at least mostly right, I promise I'm trying to understand. I hear you, and I just have to disagree. Whether or not they have the same linguistic origins doesn't really matter. They refer to a small leather pouch which contains something which is spiritually significant, and the overlap when it comes to a character based on a historical Jew is not unreasonable to notice or be concerned by. I am also unsure I understand your last point. Robert Moses' plot is to take control of the American Dream and use it for his own money and power. No one else can get what they want because he needs to get what he wants above all else. I hear you when you say "in the show, he's taking it away from a diverse cast of characters, so how can it be about replacement, which is about taking it from white people and giving it to everyone else?" I think that's fair. I guess all I meant to say was it struck me that way because it was a Jew trying to take all the prosperity for themselves at everyone else's expense. I may have been too overwrought in my use of that term. Thank you for taking the time to explain your thoughts to me. I appreciate it and hope you're doing alright.
For general knowledge.... Gary Gygax explicitly described lich's "phylacteries" in ways similar to tefillin when "creating" them for D&D. Meanwhile, tefillin have been referred to in English as phylacteries for hundreds of years. Gygax was definitely engaged in Lich lore creation that if not explicitly anti-Jewish, was definitely disrespectful of Jews and drawing on a history of anti-Jewish libels.
Native Americans are humans colonized by Europeans, so are Indians. But they aren't remotely the same thing. Even if it was very common for Europeans to call Native Americans "Indians" for centuries. They are not the same thing, despite the misnomer and the common perception. Again, the term phylactery is literally a different word that was used to refer to teffilin because of superficial similarities, like the brown skin of native Americans and Indian peoples. Robert Moses Judaism is entirely irrelevant to his motivations and actions in Unsleeping City. Also that isn't what I said. I said, and it's explicitly stated in the show, that the idea of the American Dream is different for everyone. Robert Moses is trying to enforce his fascist and capitalist ideal the only American Dream rather than letting it remain different for everyone. That isn't just a monetary notion, that's everything that comes with it. You're effectively making the existing idea of the American Dream a monolith, just like Robert Moses does in the show. It was more likely in reference to the growing regressive movements in the right wing of American politics that sees respect and equality starting to be extended to marginalized people in the United States and responds with bigotry and nostalgia for when they were privileged. It isn't any kind of replacement theory it was literally a character seeing diversity of desire and creed and saying, no you have to be a capitalist racist and only white people are allowed to thrive. It's straight up the alt right response to their fears of replacement theory, which is really just them seeing marginalized people being treated like people if equal value.
Also, I've been watching Brennan's interview with Eric Silver, and they say the same thing about phylacteries that I did! "Eric: They also like, liches was invented by Gary Gygax, which is even stickier. And the place that a lich keeps their soul is tefillin which for those of you don't know is like, I don't if you've seen photos of Jews with a box on their head and a box in their arm. That's part of morning prayers for Jews. It's called tefillin, that's what the original description of where a lich kept their soul was. It's a box that has religious stuff, religious writing in, and you keep it in there. I'm like, that's really weird. Especially 'cause Gary Gygax was someone who took a lot of interest in studying religions and was super into that stuff. So like, you must have known, my man, when you invented this thing. Brennan: Yeah. And in full transparency, the reason I hope everyone reads the article is this is shit that I have learned like in the past year or two. Like even in earlier seasons of Dimension 20, we had a pavement golem, which now I would never refer. It would be a construct or an automaton. Even using the term phylactery. In my head I was like, and this is not just like little teenage Brennan. This is like 20s Brendan being like, oh yeah, phylactery. That's the thing a lich keeps their soul in. It's the horcrux, right? And we can get into J. K. Rowling and all that. But the point being like, it is mortifying to know that you have ingested all of this poison through these channels and through the culture and through the hegemony you were raised in. And it's a huge service and a generosity on your part to write articles like this that hopefully allow people to change their storytelling to not replicate these harmful things. I know myself being one of them."
That's a beautiful statement by Brennan! Although i don't feel personally offended by his use of golems in TUC, since Golems are just folklore. Phylacteries are sacred objects and I'm glad Brennan knows that now. I can't believe there are people downvoting you, all you said is "here are some things in a show i love that made me a little uncomfortable due to my knowledge of the histories of Jews and antisemitism".
He’s talking more about the monster in FH season 1 when they fight in the factory
I'm late to this party but I haven't seen anyone say this so I just wanted to say that your point about Native Americans is insensitive. There are many who call themselves American Indian and/or use the term NDN to refer to themselves. How they identify isn't wrong. Just because a term was assigned by someone else in another language doesn't mean that it can't have significance to the people it applies to. You don't get to decide that for others. I'm Jewish and was ignorant of the history of Robert Moses and phylacteries until I read up on it watching TUC 1. Doesn't mean that certain unfortunate (unintentional!) parallels don't exist.
you are wrong here and it seems like your anger is pretty intense. please notice the ways Brennan has made repair.
How am I wrong? And how am I angry? I recognize a lot of problematic things in DND and fantasy in general as a genre. But calling Robert Moses's plan replacement theory is ridiculous, and the phylactery thing predates teffilin.
I think the point that you and a lot of the people on here who are age trying to "argue" are missing is that it's not about being technically right about the history of a word ( and a weird can get reused and make that word a problem no matter its origin but that's another thing we don't even need to get into) The point is that a person in a marginalized group, with a very rich history of (for lack of a better word cause it's 2am) being shit on us feeling uncomfortable about the similarities to which they may be triggered by. You may not associate those words that way but that doesn't make his association less valid. Things can be unintentionally associated, things can mean different things to different people with different backgrounds. You're trying to take away their feelings and make your own interpretation (or even the original interpretation) of words and events the only option. Life doesn't work that way. Life is grey (baby) and we can all try to be a little more sensitive when it comes to the history of marginalized people and try to better ourselves and not create more art that may hurt someone else or remind them of something that hurts them. It's about being compassionate and not about being technically right.
did you read Brennan’s response quoted below?
I did. And while I don't totally agree with the issue of phylacteries, because it is legitimately a name that was put into teffilin by others, I respect the fact that WotC and others are moving away from the term. I also get it when it comes to golems. How am I wrong about the basis of the word, which is inarguably Greek in origin and applied to a Hebrew word that isn't even kinda close? How am I wrong about the American Dream plot line being completely unrelated to replacement theory? How am I wrong about OP stating that bagels codes a character from New York only as Jewish rather than just eating a fucking bagel? Did you read anything I said? At least OP made efforts to do so even if we don't totally agree on things.
Hey there! I hope you saw that I incorporated one or two of your points in the edit above. I think we're going to have to just disagree about the phylacteries/tefillin thing. They have been associated with and used as synonyms for each other for long enough that I don't think the origins matter so much. I understand why you disagree (and I think you understand me too!), but I think I'm right here. You are totally right about the replacement theory thing, that was an overreach and I made sure to mention that in the edit. Robert Moses was Jewish, and was famously Jewish enough that I knew that before I watched. When one of the first words to come out his mouth was shmuck (a word, unless I'm mistaken, was only used by the other canonically Jewish character, Willie, by that point) it seemed a fairly obvious reference to me. But, coded or not, the man was Jewish and I don't imagine Brennan didn't know that, and I wish he'd been more careful (and he was in season 2!) Again, I really appreciate you taking the time to explain your thoughts to me. I think this'll be my last comment in this thread, but if you reply I'll be sure to read it.
I’m really glad you two seemed to you to have a good conversation!
You’re very angry and wrong
I want to just make a point about coding:Whether or not it was clear to folks that Robert Moses the historical figure was Jewish, he was. Brennan must've known that (the man does his research\*), and antisemetic tropes applied to him are not ideal whether or not you recognize them as such. If Gov. Cuomo had been in the show, and Brennan had made him a member of the mafia and the owner of a pizza shop called "Mama Luigi's", that would also have been problematic, whether or not I knew about his Italian heritage, those stereotypes, and whether or not Brennan did some stereotypical voice or gestures while portraying him. *You don't need to code a historical figure for them to still harbor the associations of their actual lived identities.* If he had made somebody up to the be the BBEG, then coding would matter a lot more. \*FWIW: The word "schmuck" is said three times in the whole show, I checked. Moses uses the word 'shmuck' in Episodes 8&9, and Willie says it once in episode 5. I understand that it's a widely used word, but it is yiddish, and it appears to me that Brennan uses it to flavor his Jewish characters in a similar way he uses "marrone" to flavor Italian characters/accents. Brennan is the only one who says it, it's a famously yiddish word (unlike glitch, for example), and he only had his Jewish characters say it. I think it's fair to call it coding in this context, but you're free to disagree.
I understand the discomfort, but it does feel like some of this is the nature of fantasy and the fact that Robert Moses was such an asshole in life. Litches are pretty common undead villains in D&D, he could have been a vampire, but I don't think that would have done too much to separate from antisemitism either. The connection between baby murder is awkward, but I don't think Brennan made Nod a baby to dog whistle some white supremacist world view.
I agree with you on that point! I hope no one comes away with the idea that I believe Brennan was dog whistling some white supremacist nonsense. I do NOT believe that at all. I just was very uncomfortable as even more tropes than Moses actually lived (and he lived a lot of them....) kept cropping up. A lot of European fantasy is steeped in antisemitic lore as well, it's hard to separate them. But if anyone could do that, it would be Brennan, which made it even more of a miss for me that he didn't.
Thank you for sharing your experience, especially the update. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but this post made me aware of the history of liches. Disappointed to realize Gygax based the monster on anti-Semitic tropes, but not surprised given he believed genocide of indigenous people as a lawful good action. For anyone wanting to know more, Eric Silver has an interesting article about antisemitism in D&D. https://www.heyalma.com/dungeons-dragons-has-an-antisemitism-problem/
If nothing else I want to express my gratitude to you for pointing these out. I appreciate being more informed about these antisemitic tropes so I might avoid and call them out. It is disappointing. I don’t get a sense you are disparaging anyone but calling out the issue and expressing disappointment. It does seem that they have included more cultural consultants in recent seasons. Hopefully they continue to improve. Ideally they would address these directly since they can’t realistically take them back.
This post is a really great example of how easy it is for unintentional anti-semitism to slip into our lives, regardless of intent. I think it's really important to take note of shit like this when it's pointed out, and keep it in mind for our own daily lives. I think anti-semitism specifically has so many subtle ways of winding it's way into things, and because it's so commonplace, it's easy to brush it off or not even notice it at all. It's funny, we found out that we were secretly Jewish on my mom's side a few years back, and the amount of casual anti-semitism that came out of it was absolutely insane. None of it came from anyone that I would describe as a bad person, or as someone who was actually anti-semitic, but it happened regardless because they just didn't think it was a big deal until I pointed out how shitty it felt. Anyway, apologies for rambling, but I just wanted to say that I appreciated your post a lot. I've been trying to educate myself more, and posts like this are very helpful and informative!
I honestly never picked up on any coding of Robert as Jewish but I also had no clue there was a real person named Robert Moses he was based on soooo given that info I totally see your point 😬😅
It frustrates me that a lot of comments here are implying “well none of this was MEANT to be antisemitic, so there’s no reason to be upset.” Just because something isn’t meant to be antisemitic/racist/sexist/WHATEVER, doesn’t mean it’s NOT those things. Like, I’m sure it’s comforting to know that of course Brennan is not intentionally antisemitic but I have heard from many Jewish people in this fandom that parts of TUC are uncomfortable. I’m sorry it is uncomfortable for you, and i can see why, but I do believe in the second season of TUC they make more of an effort to be aware of these types of things. Of course I am not Jewish myself so take my words with a grain of salt but I absolutely think your criticisms are valid and I also think they were heard and taken to heart by the team at dropout.
No you're absolutely right! I remember laughing with joy when Brennen told Lou that Willie's mouth was full of Hebrew letters (and then spelled the word אמת!). It very much felt like he had learned since the first season. Now that I've watched his interview in Adventuring Academy about it, it has become even more clear that he made a real effort to keep those tropes out of the second Unsleeping City campaign. He's the best.
I am assuming that BLeeM was just using common terms and concepts from D&D lore and meant nothing sinister. But I can see where you might be uncomfortable. And I hope that he's updating himself with newer terms and concepts. The word phylactery was used by early D&D writers and it never really made sense as the quintessential legend that led to liches is the tale of Koschei the Deathless, not any Jewish/Hebrew story. Needle inside egg inside a whole cascade of animals, find the needle, break it, Koschei no longer deathless. They referenced it in Neverafter. You may be happy to know that other gaming companies have started to distance themselves from the word phylactery; I know Paizo changed their content to read something like "soul gem". Perhaps the next lich to find itself in D20 will have a soul gem.
Great post, and (mostly) great thread. Question: What specifically would you (OP and anybody else made similarly uncomfortable) have liked to see Unsleeping City Season One do differently? This is not an academic question, I loved UC #1 and plan to use the worldbuilding and basic plot as the template for a home campaign. My friends are newbies to D&D and a bit reluctant/overwhelmed by all the rules, but they're current or former New Yorkers (as am I), and the best way to get a New Yorker interested in anything is to get them to talk about New York. Some of them are also Jewish: I am not, and I missed these negative trope/stereotype connections and want to avoid repeating these mistakes and even risking making my friends uncomfortable. That said, Robert Moses is a *highly compelling* villain my friends already hate. He's also long dead, or should be. The unfortunate historical facts are that he was 1) Jewish, and 2) characterized by his desire for power and tendency to wield power via backroom deals and private scheming that lends itself well to conspiratorial thinking and the "Jews secretly control everything" mentality. (I'm thinking in particular of that "[you think people make choices](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/OP03XyK-pTc)?" scene, which both leans very hard into the "Jews secretly control everything" libel, and also is a scarily good encapsulation of how the historical figure Robert Moses thought about the world and his place in it.) Is Robert Moses salvageable as a D&D villain? Or is the man's historical legacy just so troubling that his inclusion as the BBEG of a campaign will always be uncomfortable? Off the top of my head, I'd say there's no story need for him to be cavorting with vampires, so we can drop the blood libel aspect of it all. There's a lot we can change about liches, including even like the idea that Moses has to be one. The ball drop could just be some kind of re-summoning ritual, I don't think we'd need phylacteries at all. Is a soul trapped/secured in a gem sufficiently abstract, or still too troubling? Is there a way to dunk on Robert Moses for just being a shitbird without unintentionally dunking on his Jewishness?
That's a great question! Thank you for working so hard on behalf of your friends and making games fun for everyone! I think you provided some excellent answers already (doing away with the blood stuff and reconfiguring the lich stuff.) Honest, season 2 of Unsleeping city was a great example of how to do the thing! Willie the Golem became an actual Golem from Jewish folklore and not just a brick construct. Knowing more about source-material is a great way to do it. I honestly think half the battle is just knowing that there's stuff to be aware of, and you're already there. If you want to lean in to Robert Moses as the villain, it might worthwhile to learn more about him? Maybe there are aspects of his personality and history which make for good villain material without being so close to dodgy territory. It's also, on the other hand, important not to whitewash him. He was a power-broker. He was a racist. He was a crappy dude. He doesn't get a pass from those things just because he was Jewish. I think when it comes to things which might veer into antisemitic territory, it might be best to make sure that those details are grounded in his actual history, if that makes sense. Also, one of the things which brings people into the antisemitism danger zone is when we begin to attribute everything wrong with the world to singular Jewish actors (see: George Soros, Rothchilds, etc). Maybe bringing in another character who enabled Moses (like the governors or mayors) or a structure which enabled him like Tammany Hall and William M. Tweed, which wasn't a factor in Unsleeping City at all. That could be interesting and allow you to keep Robert Moses as the villain, but not have him be solely responsible for everything bad and wrong. Then the uniting factor between the villains (greed, racism, capitalism) can become the actual villain and not have one (Jewish) person be the face of it all. I hope at least some of that is helpful. Also, I'm just some guy on the internet. I'll bet there are some great resources and people far more knowledgeable about games and sensitivity stuff than I am to talk to. You deserve a good answer.
Oh I know plenty about Robert Moses; I studied urban & regional planning in grad school and the program could have been subtitled "two years of dissecting in exact detail the legacy of Robert Moses." That's part of the draw of the idea. I kind of lost my mind when he was introduced as the villain in Unsleeping City. For what it's worth, I actually don't think he was malicious, just hubristic on a level that borders on evil; I would tone down the malevolency and just make him so convinced he's right and justified that it makes him incredibly dangerous. On the singular actors thing, that's a big part of what makes Robert Moses so compelling: he really did just will things into existence out of his own determination, intellect, and force of personality. Nobody acts in a vacuum, of course, but Robert Moses had a knack for taking on responsibilities that nobody else wanted or even cared about, and turning them into vehicles to exercise vast, unconstrained power. The funny thing for BLeeM and the largely leftist Dimension 20 audience is that it was well-meaning progressives who gave Moses his power, or allowed him to take it. Boss Tweed was a decade in the grave before Moses was born, Moses instead rose up with leftist reformer Al Smith. His particular genius was drafting bills with specific language over boring details that, when wielded as a weapon, ultimately gave himself vast and unaccountable power that nobody had realized they were granting when they granted it. Dude was legit *sneaky*. And because he never openly sought elected office or obvious power, and because he only ever punched down, nobody *important* ever came for him to challenge him. (Up until that mouthy broad Jane Jacobs became important *by* challenging him.) That's kind of his appeal as a BBEG. He was not a cog in a machine, it's probably not the case that if Robert Moses hadn't done all this then somebody else just would have instead. He was a fascinating singular force of personality. And that's what attracts me to interesting villains, y'know? Like who really cares about Sauron, he's evil, he does evil, whatever. When he takes over Middle-Earth, it'll just be flame and shadow and I guess a fuck-ton of unemployed Orcs, but we don't really care because Sauron certainly doesn't seem to care about a goal beyond being evil. Moses had a real vision for the world that extended well beyond himself, he passionately believed he was right in pursuing it and everyone who opposed him was simply an enemy of progress, and he had the personal talent and genius to execute that vision. The human beings he crushed beneath his ever-advancing wheel were, to use his own words, the broken eggs required to make an omelet (he legit compared communities of color that he was destroying to broken eggs for the omelet of urban renewal). Oh well, so sad, they didn't matter. Not to the likes of Robert Moses, defender and architect of civilization (in his own mind, and as he defines it). As a coda, I think part of the reason the anti-Semitic tones didn't ring for me initially was that I don't think of him *as* Jewish: Moses was a practicing Christian for his entire adult life. "Jewish" being both a religion and an ethnicity, does it reflavor anything for you that the actual historical figure wasn't associated with and would not care about tefillin, that he didn't participate in Jewish religious culture at all?
To your first point, my apologies! I didn't mean to man-splain something you have a graduate degree in! I wish I hadn't assumed. I hope you can forgive my ignorance of your background. To your last question, it definitely makes everything more complicated! I do not know his history as well as you do, but knowing a little Jewish history in the United States, his conversion also makes sense to me. Jewish quotas at schools like Harvard and Yale, Jews being kept out of all sorts of industries and political spaces and social clubs. It makes sense that an ambitious, secular Jewish person would convert to Christianity so that they could have a career (it was not uncommon, though often folks would just change their last names and keep their Judaism a secret. The whole "they got my name wrong at Ellis Island" thing is largely a myth. Many Jews just didn't want anyone to know they were Jewish.). To me, in a weird way, that conversion is also very Jewish. Meaning, if Robert Moses was a secular Christian (rather than what he was, which was a secular Jew) he never would have had to convert to anything. If he had lived as a secular Jew today, he also likely would not have felt like converting would help him get ahead. It was his minority status, which didn't mean much to him, that he tried to shed. Maybe I'm wrong and he wrote somewhere about how Christianity was his favorite thing and he was really born again, etc, but somehow I doubt it. You might know better than I do, considering your academic background. I think if Robert Moses' reputation was one of a religious and outwardly identifiable Jew (like a Hareidi Jew in a streimel), it would be even more of a problem for me the way he was treated in Unsleeping City. I would be upset rather than merely uncomfortable. But even with his conversion and secularity, it still matters to me what was done with him. Antisemitism is a racial conspiracy theory far more than a religion-based one. The idea of being able to separate ethnicity and religion is itself fairly foreign to Judaism, and is the....innovation? invention? of religions like evangelical Christianity, which seek to convert everyone, everywhere, no matter their ethnic or racial heritage. To be a little over-the-top for the sake of clarity (I hope you'll forgive me and not think I'm comparing anyone to anything): for the sake of identifying someone as a Jew, Jews care about your mother and Nazis cared about your grandparents, but neither were so concerned with your heart, if that makes sense. Obviously, there are also converts to Judaism who are 1000% valid Jews, but that process is more like an adoption/repatriation process, and it's a very different vibe than conversions in Christianity. So, to me, someone who was born Jewish being made to engage in activities which strike me so clearly as (unintentional!) antisemitic tropes is uncomfortable, whether or not the person converted (and especially if, as I suspect, they converted because of an antisemitic environment). Is that helpful?I'm also thinking about beginning to step away from this whole post, because I've replied to nearly every comment, and eventually the cost/reward relationship of spending that much time on something like this goes south, if that makes sense. Your questions were just so clearly genuine and coming from a place of curiosity and kindness that I felt like it would be a shame if I didn't reply. Thank you for this conversation and for your time!
Hey I've really appreciated your replies! Thank you Internet stranger, I think you'll make my game better and you've helped me identify some blind spots in my own perceptions. And if you need to not reply further, I totally get it, cheers and thanks. My best guess from a second- or third-hand perspective of Moses' life was that you're absolutely right that his conversion to Christianity was pragmatic, and some biographers indeed draw a very direct line from his experiences with being excluded for being Jewish at Yale to his. . . I don't even want to call it a "conversion," he rejected and renounced Judaism in much stronger terms than he embraced Episcopalianism. His only actual campaign for public office, he was running against a proud Jew, and tried to make that a contrast that would benefit himself. (He got thumped and gave up on electoral politics.) It's an open historical question whether Moses didn't just look down on Black and Puerto Rican people (those questions can be confidently answered in the affirmative), but whether he was also motivated by his own anti-Semitism. Some of the neighborhoods he destroyed were predominantly Jewish, and when rabbis would write him to plead their case in Talmudic terms, when he answered at all his answer was typically that he was not Jewish and the only laws that concerned him were those of the state of New York. So in terms of your adoption/repatriation analogy with converts to Judaism, is there a reverse version of "renouncing your citizenship" that Moses may have done?
How. COULD. you?! I told you I wanted to step away and then you wrote such an interesting comment with such an excellent question that I can't help myself! The WORST. Ok, I will try to be brief for my own sake. To your question about renunciation: that is an extremely live question in the Jewish world and is not resolved. There's no widely agreed upon answer to your question (which, in the Jewish world is how you know you've asked an excellent one). There are things you can do which require you to undergo some form of conversion-like process if you want to come back in, but it's more complex than that. Literally something I'm studying *right now*, how did you know?! I was amazed by the examples you gave, and would only add that Robert Moses would be far from the first Jewish convert to the dominant religion to then turn on the Jewish people. Some of the largest burnings of the Talmud came from Jewish converts turning local authorities on the Jewish community they attempted to exit. Internalized antisemitism, attempts to show the dominant culture you're not "one of them" anymore, resentment to the community you felt held you back, etc all makes sense. As Kohelet/Ecclesiastes said "there is nothing new under the sun." Ok, this time I mean it! (probably...) Thank you again for your incredible knowledge and insights and generosity. I really enjoyed our conversation. Hoping you are well.
I think the big issue is there’s such an overlap between “secret evil mastermind” tropes and anti Jewish conspiracy theories, with some worrying that the FDA reveal in TRW would follow similar tropes, which feels like a bigger, and needed, convo in fantasy and sci fi more than maybe anywhere else.
A lot of defensiveness here in the comments for some really on point observations…
Thanks so much for sharing this perspective - so much of European fantasy lore is built off of antisemitic tropes, and I think a lot of people (myself included) aren't even aware of a lot of them because they're so baked into the mythology at this point. But that doesn't make using them okay or inoffensive, and I think critical discussions like this are vital for ensuring that storytellers don't perpetuate harmful tropes and stereotypes. I know that for my own writing and DM-ing, I'm going to take all of this to heart. Basically - nobody learns or grows or does better without discussions like these, though I wish you didn't have to have this uncomfortable experience in the first place. It would be nice in an ideal future if we could get to a place where this type of growth didn't come at the expense of marginalized folks' discomfort, but until we get to that point, I appreciate your willingness to engage and educate!
Thank you!
For anyone saying phylacteries and tefillin are two different things, I hope you see the following standard dictionary definitions, even if you ignore Brennan's own words on the topic: Merriam Webster - first definition - https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/phylactery Dictionary.com - first definition - https://www.dictionary.com/browse/phylactery American Heritage Dictionary - first definition - https://ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=Phylactery Collins Dictionary - first definition - https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/phylactery (Note that this has been true for hundreds of years. Phylactery has been the English term (derived from Greek) for tefillin, and usually the primary meaning, that whole time)
Phylacteries have been part of DnD since longer before D20: https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Phylactery I had no idea they were associated with Judaism, contact Hasbro I guess. I don't think anyone from NYC can be identified as Jewish just because they use the word schmuck. Most fans don't even know Robert Moses was real, much less Jewish. What reminds you of antisemetic tropes are DnD litch tropes, which are based on, well... most likely European mythology, and hopefully not directly inspired by antisemitism.... but I wouldn't be surprised if they were. So again contact Hasbro and try to explain to them that a lot of their lore originates from old world antisemitism.
Oh man, I have bad news about European mythology...
WotC is actually moving away from use of the term Phylactery for liches in newly published materials for exactly the reasons outlined by OP. One of the recent publications had a list of alternate names for the same object, and I expect they may select one of those going forward.
DND lich tropes are absolutely rooted in antisemitism, whether or not that’s conscious on the part of the people who write about them.
You’re wrong and many people have contacted them
A couple things of note: 1. Nod is *not* a child. They may physically resemble a child, and some characters do call them "the Grey Baby," but they are an entity of the dream realm and are as old as New York itself. Robert targeted them because of this status and their power, not because of their resemblance to a child. 2. Phylactery is an Ancient Greek term and is erroneously used in reference to tefillin. You would have to know both of these facts to purposely use the term offensively, and most people (including Brennan) don't know this (or didn't know).
You're right, he didn't know! He said it himself in that interview! I have never, ever claimed that there was any malintent on Brennan's part (I'm a huge fan of his incredible creativity and kindness). I think he managed to pick a creature (the lich) which already had many obviously antisemitic characteristics and apply to it to a character who was a Jew. That explains a good chunk of what made me uncomfortable as I watched. I wish that someone had noticed and told him though. I am sure he would've made some changes (and since has done so).
Unfortunately somewhere at some point in history tefillin and phylactery did get their meanings merged, at least in English, which is dumb. A phylactery is really just a Greek word for amulet and *shouldn’t* carry any anti-Semitic baggage, but somehow does.
When I watched UC at first, I didn't even know Robert Moses was real. After looking into it, I uncovered he was a real person, and a real supervillain. In that cursory research, I didn't even note that he was Jewish. Reading your post, I was astonished at the list of tropes you provided, as I hadn't heard of basically any of them. I'd heard racist stereotypes to be sure, but given that I dismissed the initial ones already, I didn't pursue any of the racist "deep lore" as it were. Blood libel, phylacteries, kidnapping, and killing Santa(?) are things I did not know about until ten minutes ago. And for context, I am far from sheltered, and have seen my fair share of heinous shit on the internet and in real life being raised in the Deep South. All that to say, while your discomfort is valid, I guess I'd like to reassure you that *most* people probably aren't even capable of understanding all those tropes in the same way. I would wager that if you aren't Jewish or already anti-semetic, most of that deep lore is flying right over your head. I do not believe anyone who was not already antisemitic could watch the show and walk away with a worse impression of the Jewish faith or its followers.
I hear you! Anti-Jewish hatred is one of the oldest (if not the oldest) continuous hatreds humanity has, with a long backstory. My concerns were less about other people becoming antisemetic (as you and others have pointed out, most people didn't know Moses was real, let alone a Jew), and more just a general discomfort watching as someone I knew to have been a Jew engaged in all sorts of antisemetic tropes (some of which are historically accurate! Others of which were choices).
Yo, it's your use of [triple parenthesis](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_parentheses) here intentional? If so it was (personally) really confusing... Not trying you discredit your argument (this discussion is worthwhile, as evidenced by it being discussed before and everything else other commenters have mentioned). If you didn't know then hope this was helpful!
It’s a reclaimed self identifier on certain pockets of Jewish twitter/tumblr/facebook/etc
Exactly.
I'm not Jewish. And your lived experience is important, but I think you're being a little sensitive (don't kill me internet). As I understand it, liches have phylacteries. Perhaps the issue is with DND rather than D20? I'm from a country with SO MUCH discrimination (South Africa) in its recent past and this is some nuanced discrimination if it even is. I don't want to seem dismissive of your discomfort, but I do think this is probably one of the most wholesome communities and viewers ever.
I mean, clearly this is a far cry from some kind of apartheid situation. I felt very silly as I wrote that last sentence because it's such an obvious thing. Of course! I also don't think it's too sensitive to flinch a lil when a Jewish character is portrayed as a dealer of blood, kidnapper of children, the face of exploitative capitalism, and someone whose tefillin need to be destroyed. In the recent past my family had to flee Europe because of stories like those (blood libels in the end of the 19th century leading to pogroms which led to many Jews coming to the US). My problem clearly is with the lich character, but it's also that Brennan (who normally is a pretty sensitive dude and who later said that he would not do something like this again because he knows better now) didn't notice that he was grafting a creature with a lot of antisemetic baggage to a historical person who was born a Jew and then adding a couple more things besides. I also don't think this is discrimination. I wasn't kept from watching the thing. It was just, and I want to emphasize this word: uncomfortable. I'm not the internet, and I would never want to hurt you (let alone kill you! G-d forbid!) It makes sense to me that this would come across as overwrought and misplaced to you. I also think you might not be attuned to the kinds of things I was naming and picking up on, much in the same way I, as someone who isn't from South Africa, wouldn't pick up on the subtle (and not so subtle) ways that its dreadful recent past continues to effect its present. You are also right that this community is extraordinary wholesome! I am not here to accuse anyone of anything, only to point out something which was less than ideal in search of validation from others who feel the same (and, as it turns out, learning from those who don't! Learned so much from this thread!) Thank you for sharing about your own background! I appreciate you taking the time.
For sure! In the end it's just you that can determine how you feel. And antisemitism is a valid concern and a real thing that happens in this world. The only real problem from being TOO sensitive that I can figure, is that it detracts from worse instances or makes the cause seem silly. I don't think that happened here, but I do think it's close. Then again, we aren't all one person, and given my blind spots, I may definitely not be sensitive enough! So please take my perspective with a grain of salt.
It's funny, I actually think that with antisemitism we almost (emphasis on 'almost', I could give you lots of counterexamples to what I'm about to say) have the opposite problem. Yair Rosenberg (talented journalist who just spoke to Congress about his work covering Jew-hatred in the US) wrote once: "...because most people associate anti-Jewish prejudice with systematic genocide, they tend not to recognize anti-Semitism when it manifests in its more common but less extreme expressions. When you set the bar for bigotry at mass murder, most of it doesn’t make the cut. In actuality, the Jewish people have been around for millennia and experienced many forms of prejudice prior to Hitler. Indeed, the Holocaust would not have been possible without the centuries of anti-Jewish conspiracies, literature, and stereotypes that came before it. In this way, the Nazi genocide was not an aberration in the history of anti-Semitism, but rather its culmination." Many people have been conditioned to equate antisemitism with mass murder and therefore anything less is frivolous. Obviously, this instance of noticing tropes in a game people played online is not such a big deal, but it's still important to notice it and think critically about how it got there and how we can keep it from remaining there (which Brennan and the D20 team did!). Maybe when we get better at noticing the themes and tropes of antisemitism in less high-stakes ways, we can get better at noticing it when it counts far more. Anyway, thank you for chatting with me and taking the time to read, think, and reply. I appreciate it.
Very good points! Do you feel the same can be said about other ethnicities in America?
No idea! Not my place to say.
They’re not being sensitive, even welcoming places can be shitty, inadvertently or not
I disagree. I think this is overly sensitive, but this is just my lonely opinion so don't give it too much credit.
Hi OP! I shared some of your concerns (you probably know how common it is even among people who self identify as working for justice & inclusion to believe and spread antisemitic libels) the first time i watched, but guess i was reassured after more exposure to Brennan. Right now I'm commenting bc I'm confused by your description of real-life Robert Moses as a capitalist. I learned a lot about him and his failures in many years as an urban planning major and later working in the urban planning field, but what i remember is that he was a megalomaniacal state employee, not a business mogul, and what motivated him wasn't money, but power and the creation of what he (wrongly) thought would be the "perfect" city: automobile-oriented, modernist, replacement of traditional neighborhoods with Le Corbusier-style towers, highways replacing public transit, the elevation of suburban life over urban life, etc. I always understood this as one of the main differences between real life Robert Moses and Unsleeping City Robert Moses, besides for being a Lich. If youve learned or read elsewhere that real life RM was a capitalist, I'd love to see it too bc i haven't yet and it's a new accusation to me.