Rabbi Owen Gottlieb, Ph.D. is the Founder and Director of ConverJent which nurtures, develops, and spreads Jewish Games for Learning. Founded in 2010, ConverJent is a resident organization at Clal in Manhattan and has been awarded a PresenTense NYC Fellowship.
In 2012, ConverJent received a Signature Grant from the Covenant Foundation to fund the design and development of a digital mobile game/simulation for teaching Jewish history. That project, Jewish Time Jump: New York, was nominated for “Most Innovative” game of 2013 by the Games for Change Festival. In 2014, ConverJent received another Signature Grant for teacher training and curriculum development and has partnered with Jewish Women’s Archive on the design of curriculum for Jewish Time Jump: New York. Jewish Time Jump: New York ran for twelve years.
Gottlieb holds the post of Associate Professor at the School of Interactive Games and Media at the Rochester Institute of Technology. at RIT, he founded and directs the Interaction, Media, and Learning (IML) Lab and the Initiative in Religion, Culture, and Policy at the RIT MAGIC Center.
ConverJent and the IMLab’s award-winning learning games have been featured at venues including Smithsonian American Museum of Art (SAAM) Arcade; Indiecade; The Boston Festival of Independent Games; Now Play This Festival, London; Meaningful Play, Serious Play, Games+Learning+Society, and numerous other venues.
Gottlieb’s teams’ award-winning game series, Lost & Found, a table-top to mobile strategy card game teaches medieval religious legal systems. The digital prototype was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the prototype was featured at the 50th Anniversary celebration of the NEH in late 2016. The first and third games in the series are set in North Africa in the 12th century and players take the role of villagers who must balance the needs of their family with the needs of the community, all while navigating the law. The game series highlights the pro-social aspects of religion – collaboration and cooperation, even when resources are scarce. The second game, with the same setting, is a storytelling party game designed to teach legal reasoning. The first two games in the series teach Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah , and the third game in the series introduces Islamic jurisprudence, as Maimonides was learning from and influencing great Islamic jurists.
Gottlieb received his Ph.D. from NYU in Education and Jewish Studies specializing in Digital Medial and Games for Learning. He was a Jim Joseph Fellow at NYU and is a HASTAC Scholar. His dissertation research is in GPS mobile gaming for cultural transmission, civic and democratic education, and subject matter interest (specifically, in modern Jewish history). Gottlieb received the NRJE emerging scholar award in 2013. Rabbi Gottlieb holds an MA from USC Cinema-Television, and an A.B. from Dartmouth College. He received an MAHL and rabbinical ordination from HUC-JIR, New York. He is a member of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the Writers Guild of America, West, and the International Game Developers Association.
Rabbi Owen Gottlieb is a visionary Jewish educator, bringing cutting edge technologies to bear on classrooms, camps, retreats and teachers’ workshops. There is no one I know who is more attuned to the educational potential of new media and their applicability to the teaching of deep Jewish content in ways that are both substantive and engaging. Unlike many others, Owen doesn’t promote technology for its own sake, but because it can create connections and community, and convey powerful ideas in an accessible way. Never condescending, Owen comes across, even through video-conference, as both passionate about his work and responsive to the students.
– Isa Aron, PhD. Professor of Jewish Education, Hebrew Union College – Los Angeles
Selected publications and press (see ConverJent’s newsfeed for the latest):
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