Israeli cartoonist Yaakov Kirschen died on April 14 at the age of 87.

After his death, many outlets celebrated him for his great life’s work: the “Dry Bones” cartoon. But throughout the 1980s Kirschen also developed fun computer games and innovative software. Regular readers of this blog know that I have been researching Kirschen and his software curiosities for many years.

I wanted to make sure his work as a software developer wasn’t overlooked. So I wrote a commentary about Kirschen’s technological legacy, which was published by the Jewish News Service. By coincidence, a couple of previously submitted but long-gestating pieces about Kirschen also published around the same time. A few months later at KansasFest 2025, I gave a retooled version of my Kirschen presentation, highlighting his Apple II work and his legacy.

It was a very busy year! So amidst personal and work responsibilities, and all the extra work trying to get those pieces published, I failed to note any of it here on the blog! So I’m creating this backdated post to acknowledge Kirschen’s passing, and to collect links to all those pieces for anyone who’d like to read/watch them.

• “Vanishing Culture: Recovering Lost Software” (May 2025, Internet Archive)
• “Yaakov Kirschen’s other legacy” (April 2025, Jewish News Syndicate)
• “Retrospective: Kirschen’s journey” (March 2025, Juiced.JS (Vol. 30, Issue 1))
• “From ‘aliyah’ to ‘zaydie’: Insights into the making of early Jewish computer games” (September 2024, Rose Library, Emory University)

And here’s a video of my Kirschen session for KansasFest 2025. I’m really proud of this presentation: