Egyptian and Arab attitudes toward Israel remain negative, and anti-Semitic myth-making would seem to preclude a nuanced historical engagement with Zionism and Israeli society. Yet a popular history course taught at the American University in Cairo (AUC) is titled “Zionism and Modern Judaism.” A poll of students who took the course suggests some prior skepticism toward portrayal of Jews in Arab media, and desire for a knowledge of Jewish history that transcends stereotypes. In this context, an ethical imperative is empirical: circumventing prejudices by confronting students with Jewish voices, by using primary sources in discussion and research. Comparison is made between the experience of teaching the course in Egypt and the U.S., highlighting an enormous disparity in ethnoconfessional backgrounds and assumptions made about the existential position of Jews/Israelis, but also a striking commonality in the engagement of students’ families with the curriculum.

History is serious. Interpreting past events, deciding why things happened the way they did, is a serious scholarly endeavor with serious, real-life consequences for individuals, families, communities, nations, and the world. Teaching history is also an extremely serious endeavor, perhaps never more so than today. The stakes are sky high. When we live in an era of "alternative" facts, AI-generated texts and images, and bots spewing misinformation about life and death issues on social media seen by millions, our job-teaching students how to access reliable primary sources and make an evidence-based argument about the past-could not be more serious. So is this really a good time to dedicate a special section of Teaching History: A Journal of Methods to "history fun and games?" It's precisely because the stakes are so high for history education right now that we need to take a close look at how history educators can utilize games, gamification, and play to help our students learn. Obviously, games are not the only way to learn how to do history. But the science of learning offers compelling evidence of how effective games can be for learning. Playing games checks a whole lot of boxes on the list of things that greatly increase anyone's ability to engage in authentic learning: evoking curiosity, encouraging autonomy, creating new connections, and strengthening sociality. Students in our social studies and history classes need to build critical thinking, information literacy, and primary source interpretation skills not just for academic success but also so they will be better equipped to navigate a world saturated with misrepresentations and deceptive discourse. Games, play, and fun can be an important part of the toolkit we bring into the classroom to take on this truly weighty responsibility as educators. Gamification is by no means a new idea in education in general or even the field of history specifically. However, I believe it has new import in 2023, when educators and learners face some truly grim challenges. We are all still grappling with the fallout of the pandemic pivot semesters, including trauma and loss. Education at every level has become one of the most vicious battlegrounds in an excoriating culture war, even as profound, systemic inequities impinge on teaching and learning. Multiple polysynchronous modalities for teaching and learning are reshaping was it even means to be in a classroom. Students, teachers, and college instructors are struggling in record numbers with anxiety, disconnection, disengagement, uncertainty, loneliness, and burnout. In short, all of us-teachers, faculty, and students of every age-need more opportunities to have fun and to engage in the social connectivity so necessary for effective teaching and learning. The authors of the articles and the subjects of the interviews in this special section of THAJM suggest a variety of ways to do exactly this. In the first article, "A Fun and Different Course: How Gamification Transformed an Online U.S. History Survey, " Chris Babits demonstrates how a "choose your own adventure" structure for an asynchronous history survey class fostered student competence, autonomy, and motivation-vital components of self-determination. Offering students options for accessing material and demonstrating their learning, accumulating points along the way, proved to be an effective course design and, perhaps most strikingly, students perceived it as an enjoyable, even liberatory way to learn. The ability to facilitate student engagement was an important factor for Christopher Barber as well when utilizing a role playing game in the classroom, as explored in "Reflecting on Reacting: Incorporating Reacting to the Past Games in the High School Classroom. " Here Barber is discussing what is probably the most widely known game framework for history educators, Reacting to the Past. 1 After utilizing the RTTP game "Constitutional Convention, " Barber concludes that "The game provides a deep dive into the historical context, events, and personalities of the Constitutional Convention, which is significantly more engaging than a