Tulane University Archives - ��ϴ��

Jewish Students Shine in ‘Jeopardy! National College Championship’

��ϴ�� — Thu, 03 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

News

Jewish Students Shine in ‘Jeopardy! National College Championship’

Author

Date

March 3, 2022

Isaac Applebaum has been a “Jeopardy!”’ fan for as long as he can remember. As a child, he and his family would shout answers at the television and hum along to the show’s iconic theme song.

This month, Applebaum finally put his knowledge to the test on the “Jeopardy!” stage.

“I’ve wanted to be on ‘Jeopardy!’ since I was a little kid. My parents were like, ‘You seem to know a lot of these answers, so you should try out,’” said Applebaum, a computational biology major at Stanford University. “I did well enough on the test to get an audition. And then from there, it was like a dream come true.”

Applebaum, 23, was one of six Jewish students who brought heat to the “Jeopardy! National College Championship” this month. The competition, hosted by Jewish actress and “The Big Bang Theory” star , tested the quick wit of 36 college students for a grand prize of $250,000.

The Jewish competitors, most of whom are active in Hillel, said their faith played a key role in their “Jeopardy!” experience. For weeks, they buzzed in answers to questions as their families, friends, and Hillels cheered them on from afar.

“When I was on stage, I wasn’t thinking about the broadcast, and I just wanted to get the most out of the experience,” said Joey Kornman, a 20-year-old junior at Brandeis University. “The whole thing still feels surreal.”

Kornman, who qualified for the semifinals after winning the quarterfinal competition, said the people made “Jeopardy!” a memorable experience.

“It was so nice to meet students from across the country,” he said. “Not everyone shared the same academic interests, but we had enough in common to be selected for this ‘Jeopardy!’ tournament.”

For Sam Blum, an engineering science major at Vanderbilt University, competing on the show was a full-circle moment.

During his senior year of high school, Blum and his father snagged tickets to a live taping of “Jeopardy!” in Los Angeles. While sitting in the studio audience, he spoke to the late Alex Trebek, who hosted “Jeopardy!” for a record-setting 37 seasons.

“I told him I hoped to be back one day,” he said. “I had wanted to be a part of this for so long.”

Flash forward to his senior year of college, Blum was finally on stage. His study strategies, including practice games with his parents, who played the part of “Jeopardy!” host over Zoom, would help him clinch third place in the quarterfinals.

“That gave me a better feel of what it would be like to answer 50 questions in a row, standing up, with a buzzer,” Blum, 22, said. “It’s all about timing.”

Lucy Greenman, a senior studying health analytics at College of William & Mary, opened her television appearance with a short story about teaching Hebrew to kindergarten and first-grade students.

“Having little kids is the best because they have no filter,” she said to “Jeopardy!” host Mayim Bialik.

The road to “Jeopardy!” fame was intense. After taking a baseline quiz, Greenman and her peers had a series of callbacks until they were selected to participate in the 36-student tournament.

Greenman, who regularly leads Shabbat services at her Hillel, was excited to interact with a Jewish star like Bialik.

“The whole show has a Jewish tint to it, because you’re going to meet a Jewish celebrity,” Greenman said. “So it was definitely a theme of the weekend, and it’s very comforting to meet somebody and know that you already have such a core part of yourself in common with them.”

Besides connecting with Bialik, Greenman, 24, said the best part of her experience was building relationships with the other competitors. Post-filming dinners and hours spent on stage helped her bond with them.

“After we played our first games, and that whole wave of stress was over, the best part was that we had all been through it together,” Greenman said. “It was just like hanging out with friends.”

For Fiona Hellerman, an international relations and philosophy major who is active in Hillel at Tulane University, the most memorable part of the tournament was speaking with Bialik about her late uncle.

As a child, Hellerman discovered she had a knack for trivia while watching “Jeopardy!” with her Great Uncle John.

“He loved trivia and random questions. We’d always watch ‘Jeopardy!’ and joke around,” Hellerman said. “He also really loved Bialik’s character in the ‘Big Bang Theory,’ which was one of his favorite TV shows.”

During her senior year in high school, Great Uncle John died of medical complications. Throughout the “Jeopardy!” filming experience, Hellerman said she felt her uncle’s presence and support.

“Everything really felt like it came full circle when I was filming,” Hellerman said. “There was a confluence of factors, like how the woman who portrayed his favorite character on the ‘Big Bang Theory’ was hosting a show that we all loved, and how I was representing my dream school on the show.”

After filming, the 21-year-old senior spoke with Bialik about how special this experience was for her and her uncle.

“She sent my family her love and said it was a beautiful story. It was just so sweet and special,” she said. “I know that I got a little misty while we were talking.”

Beyond the stress of hitting the buzzer first and the race for the cash prize, “Jeopardy!” was an experience about connection, Hellerman said.

“My time on ‘Jeopardy!’ was more than a competition. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” Hellerman said. “Having that sentimental moment with Mayim is honestly worth much more than any prize I could’ve won playing the game.”

Isaac Applebaum also shared a moment with Bialik.

When the studio cameras were rolling, Applebaum told Bialik that his mother’s battle with cancer deepened his “personal faith and relationship with God” and encouraged him to work toward a career in oncology.

He also said his faith helped him cope with stress during the competition, especially during the semifinals.

“Faith can give you perspective and also this idea that things in life happen for a reason as part of God’s plan for our life,” Applebaum said. “I think it takes some of the pressure off.”

Alexandra Goldberg is a sophomore at University of California, Santa Barbara.

Brandeis University

College of William and Mary

Stanford University

Tulane University

Vanderbilt University

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Jewish identity isn’t necessarily about how many rituals you observe. It’s about the type of person you are and what you put out into the world.

��ϴ�� — Thu, 03 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Hillel Leadership

Jewish Identity

Jewish identity isn’t necessarily about how many rituals you observe. It’s about the type of person you are and what you put out into the world.

Author

��ϴ��

Date

June 3, 2021

“I came to the first Tulane Jewish Leaders (TJL) meeting ��ϴ�� freshman year. I was like ‘This is cool, but I don’t know if this is something I’m going to do’… I was pretty involved in my synagogue in high school. Going to services was a weekly practice that was very good for my mental wellbeing, it was a good moral touch point. I knew I wanted to be involved in Jewish life here, but I thought I was going to use Hillel as a way to stay in touch with my Judaism as my own personal practice, to go to services and ‘be religious.’ It’s actually been more of an active outlet for projects, which in a way is even more Jewish.

“My first project through TJL ��ϴ�� was Shop for Good, an art market which began as a very small pilot that was attached to another Hillel event where people could buy jewelry or art from two Tulane vendors and the vendors donated some of their profits. We ended up turning it into a bigger art market that had about eight vendors by the end of the first semester of my sophomore year. We tried to put it on again and then Covid happened, but we put the third one on this past semester. Shop for good four, five, and six are definitely in the works.

“During the 2020 election season, I wanted to do something voting-related. We did a letter-writing campaign that was really awesome. We made letter writing kits that people could pick up here ��ϴ��. We ended up bringing 1,000 envelopes with letters to swing voters to the post office. After that, we did a zine-style voter guide for the local parish elections.

“I think my Jewish identity intersects a lot with my majors: political science and philosophy, and what I want to do generally with my life. Just organizing people around policies of caring for each other. Shop for Good, for example, is about tzedakah. And my political involvement is an outgrowth of tikkun olam. Politics is a mode of doing that. These are things I thought were my own personal values, but I’m starting to realize now are actually Jewish values that I’m just trying to put into practice.

“The place that I’ve gotten to do a lot of my own personal passion projects in college has been Hillel. It’s made me more of an active Jew, to see Judaism more as doing things for other people, with other people, than just an individual practice. It has definitely changed what being Jewish means to me which has been especially empowering because I think when I was growing up in synagogue I felt very insecure about my Judaism because my family wasn’t religious and I don’t ‘look Jewish.’ But Jewish identity isn’t necessarily about how many rituals you observe. It’s about the type of person you are and what you put out into the world.” — Rachel Bondy, Tulane University

As told to Cori Shalit, writer in the ��ϴ�� Writers Program.

Humans of Hillel

Tulane University

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I want to bring more awareness and to help students learn more about their Jewish identity.

��ϴ�� — Mon, 08 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Antisemitism

Israel

Leadership and Career Skills

I want to bring more awareness and to help students learn more about their Jewish identity.

Author

��ϴ��

Date

March 8, 2021

“One of the reasons that I came here was because of my grandparents from my mom’s side. They were Holocaust survivors from Libya and so my grandpa was really Zionist and he always mentioned how much it is important for us to take care of each other, not only the family, but Jewish people in general.

“The Italians were colonizing Libya and they had Nazi representatives there and they wanted to send the Jews to concentration camps and my grandparents were like ‘Hell no.’ They escaped to a nearby Arab village and then eventually escaped to Israel.

“This was a big reason why I came here. ‘We need to stick together, we have no one else,’ he would say. And I was like, ‘Wow.’ I was pretty young but it was always there. He came to Israel when he was 16 or 17 and he built Hatzav, the moshav that I grew up on.

“Four years ago, I went to a summer camp in Maryland. I never thought that I would get to the States. And then I was exposed to different kinds of people, different sects of the Jewish world. I was so surprised there was Orthodox and Reform…And I felt like I am missing a part of me because I don’t know other Jewish people overseas. So I thought this shlichut, this fellowship, would be a great opportunity.

“I felt like ‘Oh my God, there’s so many Jewish people who are in the states and they live such a different life and they have so much to say and I don’t know anything about it and I love my people,’ you know? I feel like we are one. It was important to me to get to know other people and to make the connection and to expose them to my experience and get exposed to their experience.

“So I got back to Israel. I started my degree in psychology and after the first year I got a call from the Jewish Agency and they told me we have an offer for you. They called me and they said ‘Do you want to do a shlichut? Yes? So come to Haifa University, do your Bachelor’s in Jewish history and education, and then go to a shlichut in the States — so I just left everything. I moved to Haifa in a week and I did my degree. It was crazy.

“The part that I love the most is just getting to know new people. I find that really, really cool. Each student has their own story, their own background, and for me it’s special to create those kinds of bonds because I’m coming from Israel to their college experience and this is really meaningful.

“I feel like I’m bringing the Israeli in me, the Mizrachi Israeli in me. I feel like I’m really different from the view here. If it’s the language or the way I look or whatever. I want to bring more awareness and to help students learn more about their Jewish identity. And what else do I bring? Tzchokim, do you know what tzchokim (Hebrew for ‘laughs’) is? I feel like tzchokim a little bit because American culture is so different from Israeli culture so sometimes people don’t get my jokes, but sometimes I don’t get American jokes, so it’s so funny to see how those different cultures meet each other.” — Amit David, Jewish Agency Israel Fellow, Tulane University

As told to Cori Shalit, writer in the ��ϴ�� Writers Program.

Humans of Hillel

Tulane University

The post I want to bring more awareness and to help students learn more about their Jewish identity. appeared first on ��ϴ��.

Tulane University Archives - ��ϴ��

Jewish Students Shine in ‘Jeopardy! National College Championship’

Jewish Students Shine in ‘Jeopardy! National College Championship’

Discover the Crew that’s Right for You

Jewish identity isn’t necessarily about how many rituals you observe. It’s about the type of person you are and what you put out into the world.

Jewish identity isn’t necessarily about how many rituals you observe. It’s about the type of person you are and what you put out into the world.

Discover the Crew that’s Right for You

I want to bring more awareness and to help students learn more about their Jewish identity.

I want to bring more awareness and to help students learn more about their Jewish identity.

Discover the Crew that’s Right for You

Tulane University Archives - ���ϴ�����

Jewish Students Shine in ‘Jeopardy! National College Championship’

Discover the Crew that’s Right for You

Jewish identity isn’t necessarily about how many rituals you observe. It’s about the type of person you are and what you put out into the world.

Discover the Crew that’s Right for You

I want to bring more awareness and to help students learn more about their Jewish identity.

Discover the Crew that’s Right for You

Tulane University Archives - ��ϴ��