Kickoff presentation September 20th, 2018. Downloadable PDF.
Interview: Indie Game Business- New Platforms
My interview recorded on the Indie Game Dev channel Twitch channel regarding new platforms:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcGT4qf1T18
Jewish Tough Guys
My latest presentation on Jewish Tough Guys: Boxers and Gangsters as delivered at the JCC of Ann Arbor February 14th, 2018. As always, I wore a special t-shirt for the occasion.
The presentation covers the period between World War I and World War II, when Jews were a dominant group in boxing, producing famous (or infamous) world champions like Max Baer, as well as boxers with memorable names including Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom (nicknamed by author Damon Runyon), Jewey Smith, Ruby Goldstein (“the Jewel of the Ghetto”), King Levinsky (born Harry Krakow) and more. Many of the boxers had ties to organized crime figures such as Rothstein, Lansky, Moses Annenberg, The Purple Gang in Detroit and most famously Murder Inc.
This was an era when Jews were ostracized and lived in ghetto communities such as the Lower East Side or the Brownsville section of Brooklyn where opportunity was limited and Jews had to be tough to survive.
This topic speaks not only to the Jewish experience but to the experience of all immigrant groups in America and has implications for today’s minority groups.
Download as a PDF:
Presenting at Eastern Michigan University
Thanks to Corbin Reeves for the invitation.
My presentation on the Business of Games can be found here:
From Tragedy to Comedy: The Origins of Jewish Comedy in America
On February 22nd, 2017 I gave a talk on the Origins of Jewish Comedy in America tracing how the American comedy scene evolved from the often tragic experiences of European Jewry. In Western Europe, Jews were struggling with the issues of assimilation versus identity. In the East, the expansion of the Russian Empire had relegated the Jewish populations of Russia and Poland into the Pale of Settlement. Fleeing to America, Jewish immigrants found themselves living in the ghetto of the Lower East Side. Yet somehow these same conditions gave rise to generations of comics that changed theater, film and television in America.
Follow the story of some of these comic geniuses who learned to Laugh Through The Tears: