The screenwriters of "Game of Thrones," now in its fourth season, are Jewish. Photo: mezclaconfusa via Flickr.

JNS.org – It was only a matter of time before someone was going to write about Jews involved in Game of Thrones. After all, there just must be a Jewish connection behind the hugely successful fantasy show (based on the equally successful book series) now in its fourth season on HBO.

And, typically, there is. The Times of Israel has published a lengthy piece about D.B. (formerly Daniel) Weiss and David Benioff (formerly Friedman), the Jewish screenwriting powerhouse duo behind the now-iconic show.

The two first met while studying at Trinity University in Dublin.

“We were two American Jews in Dublin, with no Irish roots of any kind, obsessed with Irish literature and trying to find a functional gym in Dublin in 1995, which is not something that most Irish people in 1995 were all that preoccupied with,” Weiss said earlier this year in Vanity Fair.

“It was a great year and I loved it, but after writing my thesis on Beckett, and kind of killing myself to write this paper, and then realizing that three people on the planet would read it, maybe, I decided that academia wasn’t going to work for me. I was going to get too frustrated… So I thought maybe writing about dragons would be better for me,” he said.

Three years later they reunited in Los Angeles, and following a few other screenwriting stints, they began crafting the script for Game of Thrones, a show whose mantra can be summed up as “The King is a lost cause, it’s the rest of us I’m worried about,” in the honorable words of Tyrion Lannister.