Meredith Gran’s Perfect Tides (2022) is a point-and-click adventure game set on a fictional island in the early 2000s, where a sharp, awkward, and painfully self-aware teenage girl named Mara navigates grief, desire, friendship, and identity. It’s also, according to literary scholar Josh Lambert, the sharpest, funniest, and most heartbreaking coming-of-age story about a young Jewish woman in any medium in the 21st century. In this class, we’ll dive into what makes Perfect Tides such a groundbreaking work of Jewish storytelling—not in spite of being a video game, but because of it. Participants will have a chance to play parts of the game, learn about the complicated history of Jewish representation in video games, and analyze key scenes that show how Jewishness—cultural, emotional, and intergenerational—can live in digital form.

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.