The Jew in Germany is regarded as only a
guest of the people. He has offended by
trying to turn himself into the host.
Thoughtful Germans hold that it is
impossible for a Jew to be a patriot.
What will happen in Germany is not now
known, but the Germans will doubtless prove
themselves equal to the situation by
devising methods of control at once
unobjectionable and effective.
Although it quickly shifts into an
alt-history, MachineGames' Wolfenstein series doesn't
exist in a vacuum. As much as the games
work as a cathartic Nazi killing romp,
they also make efforts to contextualize
a fictional reich takeover in the real
history of oppressive race science and
white supremacy. To do so, Wolfenstein: The
New Order and The New Colossus give
their stories to the marginalized. Grace,
Caroline, Set, Tekla, J, Bombate. Each of
these characters holds some quality that
makes them unacceptable to the Nazis. And
as such, each of their continued
existence is in itself a challenge to
Nazi ideology. This resistance by survival
makes the story intimate, despite the
constant presence of a global faceless
evil. We're committed to these people and we
gradually learn how their histories with
oppression have affected who they are
today.
Some of the most complex character work
comes from the game's protagonist, BJ
Blazkowicz. But as interesting and
nuanced as BJ is, there was the
opportunity for his personal history
with Judaism and marginalization to
further inform his character. By looking
at the history of how Jews were
categorized in the United States,
particularly their history with the
concept of whiteness, we can learn a lot
about BJ Blazkowicz- and also see where
he could have grown further. Let's not
get ahead of ourselves. First things
first.
BJ Blazkowicz, the main character of
every Wolfenstein game from 1992 until
today, is in most ways a perfect Aryan.
He's a brick wall of a man. 6'3, 245
pounds. His hair is blond and his eyes
are blue and there is not a thing he's
met that he cannot kill. In many ways he
fits right in with the violent white
supremacist Nazi regime that rules the
world in the alternate history of these
games. And his features are a frequent
topic of praise in this new world order-
"Very Aryan face too - are you out of 
station one?" When he's spoken to by Nazis,
there's an almost palpable sense of
pride. "We must be the superior race," you
can feel unspoken in their admiration.
"Look at the specimen. He's the Ubermensch.
The highest evolution of man." But
Blazkowicz, for all his anatomical
perfection, is not the Nazi ideal. He's a
Jew. He's the son of a Jewish polish
mother and a Polish father, he's a
half-breed
who could never meet the Aryan criteria
the Nazis have built a world around. And
Blazkowicz's existence is implicitly a
challenge to more than just Nazism. By
being who he is, he not only defies Nazis
but a long history of American racial
ideology as well. His attitude, his
empathy, his identity- this forms the core
of his motivation for resistance. And the
fundamentals of his character, and the
potential for his future growth, lie in
his childhood
BJ Blazkowicz was born and raised in
Mesquite, Texas. The complexities of his
characters start to raise their head
almost immediately. He's an all-american
boy,
Texas strong, committed to the red white
and blue. He's a scared kid who spends
his waking hours hiding from his abusive
father and sleeps only to be tormented
by night terrors. He learned to use a gun
as a boy, and as soon as he was able, he
joined the army to fight for our freedom.
He was forced to shoot his dog by his
father, and then left his abused mother
when he enlisted.
He's practically invincible!
He's incredibly vulnerable. His childhood
isn't devoid of kindness, thankfully. His
mother, Zofia, does her best to shield BJ
from his father's rage. She speaks to him
gently, she tells him about her family,
she gives him a ring passed down through
eight generations to someday give to a
person he loves. When he's injured, she
says the birkat hagomel at his
bedside- a Jewish prayer to be said after
someone survives a life-threatening
situation. She's held on to her Judaism
and she uses it to care for her boy. But
she hides it from her husband. 
Rip Blazkowicz, father and husband, is a
businessman. At least that's what he sees
himself as. In reality, he just represents
the worst of the country he's determined
to succeed in. He thinks he knows the
reasons he's failed thus far. "All manner
of scum and sickly minds and dirty bodies,
cockroaches doing everything in their
power to rob the white man of what he's
earned. It's on us to straighten out the
queer." He blames everyone but himself for
his lack of success. He hits his son for
spending time with a girl who's black, he
hits his wife for not letting him hit
his son, and he would have faded into
fitful obscurity, an abusive nothing of
a man
with nothing to show for it. But
something else changed first. Something
that made the world perfectly fit
Rip Blazkowicz's style of cruelty.
Woops!!!
BJ Blazkowicz has been two things in his
adult life- a soldier, and comatose. The
first time we meet him,
he's on a mission to kill the Nazi
leader "Deathshead" in 1946. He fails.
Failure doesn't quite get across what
happens, actually. In the middle of a Nazi
fortress, he's trapped with several other
soldiers. Deathshead forces BJ to
choose one of his squad mates to die, a
Sophie's Choice that will haunt him for
the rest of his life. He escapes, barely,
and is rescued by a Polish mental
hospital that takes care of him for
sixteen years. When the hospital is
ransacked by Nazis, he un-vegetablizes himself,
kills every fascist in sight, and then finds out some
really bad news. "It's 1960." "1960? I have to find a
way to contact the US military, I gotta
find my unit, let them know I'm alive."
"There's no more war, it's over." "No
no the war ain't over, look at all these
Nazis walking around!" "They won, it's over,
the Nazis rule the world now, they're
everywhere, everywhere." "What about the U.S.?"
"USA what's the word, poddac sie." "They 
surrendered?" But he won't take a defeat
lying down, no way. So over the course
of two games and a mounting pile of Nazi
scalps, Blazko and a growing resistance
fight to take back the world. And one of
the most surprising things we find out
during this time is that BJ Blazkowicz
is more than a soldier. He is, kinda
surprisingly given his meathead looks, a
good man! And I mean that even without
taking into account his ethical removal
of fascism. BJ shows a refreshing amount
of deference for other people, their
personhood and their talents.
Despite Klaus' labeling, he's not a
Johnny Cowboy. "No worries, Johnny Cowboy." 
He learns from others and will accept that
he's wrong. He doesn't question taking
orders from women, disabled, black or
otherwise. He goes out of his way to show
small kindnesses to people. He falls in
love with Anya, a woman who took care of
him all those years in the institution.
She's sharper than him, and probably as
capable with a gun. He trusts her. In the
second game, she's pregnant. That fact
doesn't remotely limit her, but from the
moment Blazko finds out, his whole world
changes. "I got kids on the way! And I'll be damned if
I'm gonna raise him in a world run by these
Nazi assholes!" No matter what happens to him, no
matter the suffering he endures, it's
worth it to make a better future for his
coming children. He is an embodiment of
what he feels is the American Way. He is
strong, considerate, self-sacrificing. And
of course, he fucking hates Nazis.
[Music]
Both The New Order and The New Colossus
are smart games. These are games that
have done their research, that really put
in time to imagine this horrifying
alternate history. And the first point I
want to talk about that these games
highlight is that race science and eugenics
are just straight garbage. Early on in
Wolfenstein: The New Order, you're forced
to play a card game with high-ranking
officer Irene Engel. She doesn't know who
BJ is but says her game is designed to
test if someone is a true Aryan or not.
You pick between two pictures again and
again. Which one makes you most excited?
Which one is more frightening? At the end
of the test,
no matter your choices, she reaches down,
picks up her gun, and aims it right at
you.
And then she laughs. "If
you were not Aryan you would have gone
for the gun." She says that the game is
unnecessary, that she can just pick out
the impure with her naked eye. But she's
wrong, of course. BJ's family is about
as impure as it gets.
He's a Jewish American who is currently
on a quest to free imprisoned resistance
fighters! If Engle's test if it had any
legitimacy, any backing in actual
science, it should have been able to pick
this up easily. But the lines that the
Nazis have used to define personhood
have nothing but hate to prop them up.
Blazkowicz is a paradox in their
ideology, a wrench in the system. He is,
put simply, a superior Jew. It is no
accident that the resistance in
Wolfenstein is led by people who are
black, disabled, Jewish- all the
populations the Nazis have defined as
lesser. Each victory over the reich
proves again and again that the idea of
Aryan superiority is just absurd. It also
makes clear that fascism just doesn't
work. Yes, this alt-reich has temporarily
taken over the world. But even without
the actions of our main characters, that
grip is tenuous. The concrete they've
built their cities with is rotting from
the inside, their Fuhrer is a disgusting
shell of a man, a walking corpse that
everyone still treats with utter
deference. In a mission in Roswell you
overhear a conversation between a Nazi
and a couple Klan members who now serve
the Reich. The Nazi can barely disguise
his scorn. "Have you taken your German
lessons?" "Oh yes sir."
Good! You. How do you say thank you?" 
"Oh course sir. Let me see it's um."
"yes out with it" "Dank-
Dankey?"
"Mein got, no that was terrible. You're
butchering my beautiful language. Tt's
danke shein, say it!" 
"Dankey-Shoe?" The implication is clear. These
"dumb hicks" are only allies so long as
they have another scapegoat. Their
dictatorship itself only survives by
finding new enemies to stomp out, and
once the blacks and the Jews and the
queers are dealt with, the Nazi will turn
their gaze on to someone else.
Sooner or later, Nazis will need a new
population to demonstrate their
superiority over, and when that happens,
these backwater Americans who can't even
say "Danke Shein" correctly will be first
on the chopping block. "bBcause the time
will come when the wheat detaches from
the chaff."  Fascism is a snake that eats
itself, and Wolfenstein makes that
crystal clear. Also clear is that pre-war
America was no utopia either. We hear
about the racism present in the U.S.
from before the war. We hear about it
from the racists- "This is a white man's
world now, white man's got to keep it
Christian." And we hear about it from the
people that racism was perpetrated
against. "That's not the America I fought
for." "Really? I was little, my mother wanted
to take me to the picture show but we
had to go in through the fucking colored
entrance. I wanted a hot dog and
lemonade, but the sign says 'we don't
serve Negroes in this establishment'". We
learn how easy it was for America to
flip into full-on white supremacy. Sure
there was a hostile takeover but the
game makes clear that it wasn't
particularly hard to win over white
Americans. "White America?
they done packed up and given in, see I
guess they don't have the fighting
spirit no more. Nah they just do whatever
the fuckin Fuhrer tells them to." Most
simply accepted that things would be
better if they just went along with it.
Slavery exists again now, but for moms
and kids getting milkshakes in New
Mexico, that's not so pressing of a
concern. And this American apathy, this is
where BJ Blazkowicz runs into a little
cognitive dissonance. Because Blazko has,
in many ways, defined himself against
Nazi ideology. The Nazis are uncaring but
he's empathetic. They are white
supremacists and he's an egalitarian.
They're German and so he leans hard into
his American identity. But an American
identity is complicated, really
complicated, and ultimately this is where
BJ's self-identifying falls short. Because
what he doesn't fully understand is that
the America of his youth isn't a
refutation of Nazism. Not at all. If
Blazkowicz was to return to that America,
his Jewish heritage would make him
lesser by definition. In fact, the Aryan
supremacy that fuels the worldwide Reich
is directly inspired by the country that
BJ calls home.
[Music]
We've got to go back to BJ's childhood
and before for a second here, and while
I'll be mentioning characters from the
game for reference points this isn't
Wolfenstein's fictional universe
anymore. This is just straight-up history.
So what kind of America was BJ raised in?
Well, Zofia BJ's polish-jewish mother,
would have been part of America's
largest wave of Jewish migration. From
1880 to 1914, more than 2 million Jews,
mostly Russian and polish, immigrated to
the US. This quadrupled the Jewish
population in the United States
basically overnight. And this did not go
over super well with white Americans.
There had been Jews in the States before
then, of course, and they managed to live
pretty quietly and drama-free. In other
countries like France or Germany,
pre-existing institutions stopped Jews
from being seen as authentic citizens of
those countries. Anti-semitism in Europe
has a pretty extensive history. But in
the relatively new country of America,
these delineations didn't really exist!
So Jews were able to immigrate in small
numbers and face little prejudice. They
mostly lived in isolated groups by
choice, maintaining a level of self
definition despite their growing
secularity. But what would they call
their group? Judaism, especially then, was
a religion with a pretty clear bloodline.
The most fitting name might be "ethnicity"
but that concept didn't really exist yet.
Jews had previously called themselves a
nation, but that didn't work either-
they were Americans! And they actually
really wanted to fit in with that
national identity. A separate nation
implies not being part of the whole. So
they landed on another word that they
used to describe themselves.
[Music]
As much as commander Engle and the white
supremacists of the world like to think
they have it nailed down, race is a
really slippery concept. It's socially
constructed of course, but even within
the individual societies that construct
it, it's never really pinned down. Check
out some censuses. Scrolling back through
America's history of "how many people are
there and what are they like" paints a
wildly varying portrait of how we've
tried to group the other. Because there's
always been a checkbox for white people.
But everyone else has been faced with a
form that changes radically depending on
the decade. Do you define if you're a
"quadroon" or "octoroon?" If you're an Asian
immigrant, can you pick the country
you're actually from? Or are you just stuck
with "Chinese"? So Jews decided they were
a race, but the white people in charge,
the ones who made institutions and
decided census categories, didn't really
care. Let them do whatever they want-
there are only a handful of them anyway.
They're not black, they're not Chinese, so
they can be white. In fact, Jews were
sometimes used as an example of
outstanding white achievement. Some
white Americans even cited the continued
survival of the Jewish people as proof
that they exemplified white power and
superiority. The argument went that "so
many people tried to kill the Jews but
no one had done it successfully. They
must be smart to survive all that
hardship, and if they're smart, they must
be white." But this luxury of acceptance
didn't last forever. It ended with the
arrival of two million plus more Jews
around the turn of the century, including
Zofia, BJ's Jewish mother.
[Music]
Jews moved into New York hard, and
because they typically held industrial
positions back in their home countries,
Jews started work in various skilled
industry positions pretty much
immediately. And suddenly, a full half of
New York's industrial workforce was
Jewish.
Suddenly, Jews were the face of American
modernization. And this was a concept
that the old white guard of America
wasn't particularly comfortable with. A
changing world is scary if you
controlled the old one. With this flood
of new people, white Americans panicked.
What if this new population of Jews
upset the racial hierarchy? What if white
people lost their throne at the top? And
so white Americans started pushing back
against this Jewish assimilation. And to
do so, they used the same strategies they
had used to successfully oppress other
racial minorities. The swing was as quick
as it was complete. Whereas just years
ago, Jews had exemplified white power and
superiority, now they were cast as "rough
and hairy tribes who lived in the most
disgusting areas of cities." Jews began
running into roadblocks they had never
met in the US before. For the first time,
they were barred from unions and housing
because "whiteness was a prerequisite for
membership." To emphasize their
inferiority, whites made strong efforts
to align Jews with Black Americans, who
of course were experiencing their own
oppression at the hands of white
Americans. Anti-semitic comics started to
draw Jews with larger lips and kinky
hair. In 1913, a mob in Georgia broke
into a prison and lynched a Jewish man
imprisoned there. The next day, the local
newspaper headline read "The Next Jew Who
Does What Frank Did Is Going To Get
Exactly The Same Thing We Give To Negro
Rapists." The turn against Jews wasn't
just social- it was backed up by the
bullshit race science of the day. The
Passing of the Great Race was an
extremely widely read book by an
American writer named Madison Grant. It
got four editions and was translated
into several languages, and notably it
roped Jews into existing thoughts about
miscegenation.
"The cross between a white man and an
Indian is an Indian, the cross between a
white man and a Negro is a negro,
and the cross between any of the three
European races and a Jew is a Jew."
[Music]
This is the world that BJ grew up in, one
where his mom was strongly other, a
disgusting breed poisoning cities a
sneaky intellectual trying to upset the
racial hierarchy. He grew up in a white
supremacist world where his mom was not
white, and as Grant stipulated so clearly,
that meant that BJ wasn't either.
And even though they lived in Mesquite,
well away from the embattled urban
centers on the coast,
BJ's father was well aware of the
existing racial structure of the United
States. Rip Blazkowicz is a bigot who
built a fortune only after profiting
from the imprisonment and murder of
other people. He sold out his neighbors,
he sold out his wife. But Rip wasn't an
outlier, not an aberration in the
American Way.
He was America. A white supremacist who
rose to power
only through subjugation and
dehumanization. "Before all this, before the
Germans, before the war, back home man you
were the Nazis." How much of America's
infrastructure was built on the back of
slave labor? How many of the country's
cities rest on lands conquered through
the genocide of native people? An often
neglected fact about World War II is
that the Nazis drew direct inspiration
from the United States system of racial
hierarchy. It was so clean, so effectively
used to create hatred. Nazis studied how
the United States suppressed non-white
immigrants and consigned minorities to
second-class citizenship. In private
hearings, they discussed how the US model
for white supremacy in the Jim Crow
South could be transposed to Germany and
inflicted on the Jews. The Nazis were
keenly influenced by America's laws
forbidding interracial marriage. The
harsh criminalization of mixed-race
marriages in America set an example for
the Nazis, as they created their law for
the protection of German blood and
German honor, a law that forbade German
Jews from marrying non-jews, invalidated
existing mixed marriages, and sent
offenders to prison labor camps.
What functionally is the difference
between this- "any of the three European
races and a Jew is a Jew," and this?
Nothing! Nothing except America did it
first. Did this change? Sure, but only because
America, like BJ, defined itself in
opposition to its enemy. Only after
fighting the Nazis, only after
positioning itself against them, did the
U.S. change its ideology to match.
Suddenly, all the pro-eugenics literature
regarding Jews was forgotten in the U.S.
replaced by studies that proved their
whiteness. In 1943, Jews moving to the
U.S. stopped being marked as Hebrew on
their immigration documents, and this was
no fluke. It was done by naturalization
services for the express purpose of
distancing government classification
schemes from those used by the Nazis. The
U.S. welcomed Jews into whiteness
because if it didn't, it would actually
have to come to terms with its own
history of anti-semitism. White America
fell all over themselves to distance
their ideology from the Nazis, to create
a clear distinction that fell in line
with the actions of America's military.
But consider this: World War 2 and the
Holocaust are the first time in American
history that the mass criminalization
and killing of a non-white population
actually went against the interests of
the United States. It took fighting on
the other side of a holocaust for white
Americans to change their ideology. But
there was no reconciliation, no apology.
We can see what a flexible construction
whiteness is here. White Americans just
suddenly developed a sort of cultural
amnesia about the worst of their
anti-semitism. Jews weren't white before
the war, now we are. Or more accurately,
Jews are white until it's beneficial to
code them- code us- as the other again.
What swings one way can easily swing the
other. This game showed us that even the
Klan's purity isn't guaranteed under a
fascist gaze. The concept of whiteness, in
America, in Germany, has never been about
skin color. It's about exerting power.
Blazkowicz isn't fighting for that
America, no way. That America has found
its home on the Nazi-choked streets of
Roswell, in the irradiated shell of New
York, and in the desperate American
actors begging to participate in Nazi
propaganda films. 
Him and the resistance are fighting for an America
that has never existed, but one that
could. That's what makes the revolution
of these games so electrifying, it's why,
despite happening in an alternate history,
it feels like it speaks so clearly to
today's struggles. There is no regression
in Wolfenstein resistance no longing to
go back to the good old days it's hard
to think of anyone in their group who
would have had full rights in the world
before Glasgow has to fight for a new
reality if he wants to truly succeed. Him,
his friends, his future daughters- they're
depending on it. But does he know this?
I'm not really sure. He certainly knows
what he's fighting against, but the full
scale of his resistance,
I think, eludes him. And I think there's
an easy fix for this.
[Music]
I mentioned before that BJ's resolve is
strongly rooted in his self-identity and
much of that comes from being an
American, but as we've learned, this
American identity of Blazko really
doesn't oppose the Nazis as much as he'd
like it to. But he does have an identity
that he could draw strength from, and
surprise! Its Judaism. Here's the thing: BJ
Blazkowicz is Jewish. It's almost
non-negotiable. His mom was Jewish,
Judaism is matrilineal, I doubt he's
found time to convert to anything else.
But does he, and I'm sorry for the
simplification, feel Jewish? To me, no. I'm
not asking for him to look like the Bear
Jew, I actually love that he looks so
video-game-dude. I've talked about what a
clever subversion it is for him to be a
perfect Aryan. But I want to see that his
Jewish identity like, means something to
him. I want him to be fighting for
himself. I want BJ to realize that he's
the latest in a long long line of Jewish
fighters. there's a reason that Purim,
Passover, Hanukkah- basically every Jewish
holiday can be summed up by the refrain
"they tried to kill us, we survived, let's
eat."
BJ is living through one of these near-
extinction events, just like so many have
before him. I want some recognition from
BJ that he's part of this chain, and I'll
be honest, some recognition that he's
connected to...me. There aren't many Jewish
game characters. Almost none. Despite all
the oppression I've talked about thus
far, despite the history of people doing
things to the Jews, there are so many
ways of expressing Judaism outside of
trauma. Maybe BJ could take an interest
in learning Hebrew from Set, or learn
potato pancake recipes with the chefs, or
discover and incorporate the ideas of
Tikkun Olam into his worldview.
He could even fight alongside embattled
Jews across the world. Brazil has a
pretty huge Jewish population, Argentina
does too. Despite the stereotypes, Jews
live everywhere,
and look every kind of way. Under the
oppression depicted in these games,
everything is resistance, every small
human action, every act of kindness, every
effort to set yourself apart from the
reich's cultural zeitgeist makes you
less of a Nazi and more of a person. This
is a game about individuals fighting to
stay individuals, and Blazkowicz leaning
into his Jewish heritage is about as big
of a "fuck you" to the Nazis as he could
possibly deliver. He doesn't have to be
particularly knowledgeable- with the home
he grew up in, it would be a shock if he
was. But BJ learning about and embracing
that heritage, making this part of his
political resistance in accompaniment
with his physical resistance, it would
just plain make his character even
stronger. And also, it would mean the
world to me.
[Music]
So originally I was going to release
this video a couple days ago. And then, on
that day 49 people were murdered by a
white supremacist in mosques in New
Zealand. And so putting this out a video
that discusses a different religious
group and is just full of horrifyingly
violent imagery,
it felt grotesque. To be honest, it still
kind of does, but here we are. I talked
about Judaism in this video because
that's what I know, that's what I've
spent years researching and experiencing
and learning about, but the process of
racialization, letting groups assimilate
or making them other, that's not unique
to Judaism at all. And the levels of
Islamophobia across the world are a
fucking nightmare. And the way people
talk about it, how immigration bans are
"necessary for our safety" or how the
Western Christian civilizations are more
"civilized" it's exactly the same shit
I've been talking about for half an hour
here. I don't know how to wrap this up,
I'm keeping my original outro which will
be a very different tone than this
because I'm adding this part later. But
be aware of the dog whistles people used
to dehumanize others, and actively work
the deplatform the people that are
spewing hate. Use your privilege to
protect those who don't have the same
protections as you.
And now, here's past Jacob with some
happier things to say. Wow okay I want to
sincerely thank everyone who made it to
the end here. This is the most ambitious
project I've ever done on this channel,
so for you to actually watch and
interact with it is hugely meaningful.
Thank you. There was a lot of history and
research that went into this. I'm putting
all my sources on the screen now, but if
I had to recommend one book to start
with, it'd be Eric Goldstein's book "The
Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and
American Identity." A ton of the
background for this video came straight
out of that. And finally I want to thank
Zach Frazier.
He provided the voices for both Henry
Ford and Madison Grant, and honestly they
blew me away. I didn't even know if I
wanted to do the voices thing but he
sent me those, and oh my god. He has his
own channel which I've linked below-
maybe hire him for your next project? I
don't know, talk to him about that.
That's- that's it. That's all I've got to
say here, this video is too long already.
Shabbat Shalom, y'all! Good night
