Rabbi Owen Gottlieb: Playing with Judaism in the Digital Age

Rabbi Gottlieb discusses contemporary technologies for the transformation and extension of pathways for Jewish learning. Rabbi Owen Gottlieb, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of Interactive Games and Media at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He is the founder and lead researcher of the Initiative in Religion, Culture, and Policy at the RIT MAGIC Center, the Institute’s state of the art research laboratory and game studio. In 2010, Rabbi Gottlieb founded ConverJent: Jewish Games for Learning. Gottlieb’s mobile augmented reality game Jewish Time Jump: New York was nominated for Most Innovative Game by the 10th Annual Games for Change Festival in 2013. Current projects include a strategy card-to-mobile game to teach medieval religious legal codes, beginning with Maimonides Mishneh Torah. The digital prototype of the game is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Rabbi Gottlieb and William Braniff (University of Maryland) also recently presented on Video Games and Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) at the Games + Higher Education + National Impact conference in Washington D.C. Rabbi Gottlieb’s interdisciplinary work spans cultural anthropology, games for learning, media and game studies, history and religious education, and the learning sciences. He holds an A.B. From Dartmouth College, M.As from USC School of Cinematic Arts, and HUC-JIR (where he was ordained in 2010), and a Ph.D. in Education and Jewish Studies from NYU. Rabbi Gottlieb is a member of the CCAR, the International Game Developers Association, and the Writers Guild of America, West.