Going To Shul After The Zombie Apocalypse: Jewishness in The Last Of Us

The 2020 video game The Last of Us, Part 2, introduced Jewish characters and settings into its imagined world of the U.S. in the years after an apocalyptic outbreak that turns people into monsters. The adaptation of the game into a television series, airing on HBO now, introduces viewers to Dina, the Sephardic Jewish girlfriend of the protagonist, Ellie, who has been called "the most fleshed out direct Jewish representation in a [major video] game." Critics and fans have also considered the game's story an allegory about Israel/Palestine. Drawing on exclusive insights from the game's creators and extensive research, Josh Lambert will lead a discussion about all of this, and the place of Jews in the world of The Last of Us, including some never-before seen details, excavated from deep inside the game. He'll also explain how, despite the game's best intentions to represent its Jewish characters respectfully, it contains some errors that suggest the degree to which Christianity influenced the designers who made it--and we'll see whether the television adaptation has improved on this. 

Josh Lambert is the Sophia Moses Robison Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and English, and director of the Jewish Studies Program, at Wellesley College. A scholar working at the intersection of Jewish Studies and American Studies, he is the author of the books Unclean Lips (NYU, 2014) and The Literary Mafia (Yale, 2022), which explore two areas in which Jewishness profoundly shaped the direction of modern and contemporary life in the U.S.: in the former, around questions of obscenity and sexual representation, and in the latter, in the development of the book publishing industry. He served from 2012 to 2020 as the Academic Director of the Yiddish Book Center, and co-edited the anthology How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish (Restless Books, 2020). He judges fiction prizes regularly (including the $100,000 Sami Rohr Prize), and writes book reviews and essays for general audiences in publications like the New York Times Book Review, Jewish Currents, and Lilith.

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