Always in Jeopardy

My apologies for my perforce lack of updates; I would cite excuses like I’ve been out of town, hearing back from grad schools, and having my soul bled out by the corporate system, but yeah, okay, so there are my excuses, I said them.

As some of you know, my post-work ritual has long consisted of one practice, watching Jeopardy, which we all know as a staple in the television game show culture for the past 23 glorious years.

I suppose it would be wrong to characterize watching Jeopardy as simply one practice because there are various activities in the Jeopardy substrata that consist of more than viewing and answering alone. An example or two:

1. Degrading the competitors on the program (with such classic names as “Fattie” [whose three-day reign included a domination of the food categories and TWO back stories centered around cooking and/or the consumption of food], “Shhtuttering Sherman” [obvious reasons] and more recently, “Minotaur” [for reasons that reveal more cruelty than anything else]) is a pastime in itself, one that when played well enough can offset the doldrums incurred during even the most low-scoring day possible.

Often low-scoring games (or “horseshit category games” as I prefer to call them) become simply a half-hour of pure spite, especially directed in response to wrong answers “NO, THEY ASKED FOR THE CAPITAL NOT THE COUNTRY, YOU MORON!”

2. Politicizing or (over) analyzing Jeopardy clues for their (ahem...latent) conservative or anti-Semitic biases.

I know that I have a problem, but when set in front of a television after working (factoring in the semi-frequent intake of vices, bad weather, and a generally spiteful disposition), this is a recipe for disaster or entertainment. However, sometimes, I find the happenings during the course of a game of Jeopardy poignant and I think about them long after the show has ended.

For instance, last night’s game featured a category in the first round listed as “Jewish History”…obnoxiously followed by the category in which each question includes the letters “OY”…those motherfuckers. I would love to see them follow black history with “YO” or Chicano history with “Aye”…see, it promotes racism by osmosis!

Anyway…sorry…so in Jewish History, the answers in last night's game (or a paraphrased version of them) were the following.

$200: In blah blah blah BCE, the Maccabees fought off a Syrian invasion of this city.

What is Jerusalem?…obvi!

$400: “Josefov” in Prague is an example of this kind of area in which Jews frequently lived in Europe.

My first instinct was to answer “What is a Jewish quarter?” because Josefov is the “Jewish Quarter” in Prague and there were many such Jewish quarters in Europe but the answer they were so capriciously looking for was “ghettos.”

$600: The term for these events means “destruction” in Russian. They got really bad after the 1880s.

(Uncomfortably) “Uhh…pogroms?”

$800: This 19th century Jewish movement, now the largest in North America, is based on reducing ritual.

“The Reform Movement”…Jorge actually nailed this one before I even read it)

$1000: Rescue operations brought Jews from this famine-stricken African country to Israel in the 1980s

“Ethiopia” …if a decade of Zionist inculcation has taught me anything…

And after this ends the category…it starts to hit. Beyond the subtle correlation of pogroms to the first wave of immigrants to Israel in the 1880s (a tacit, if distant, nod of approval to Zionism), I found the clues bothersome. I looked to Jorge after the first three clues and noted “Syrian invasion, ghettos, and pogroms.”

Typically, the first clues of the first round are the easiest ones, ones that are based in general knowledge and not so intensely esoteric queries like the intricacies of Operation Moses and the Ethiopian airlift. But are these facts the first (or most recognizably academic) events underscored in Jewish history? Invasions and ghettos and pogroms (oh my)…the reduction of rituals???

The ubiquitous Holocaust theme notwithstanding (being a hot button issue these days anyway), even distant academic Jewish history is seemingly defined by the tragedy of the Jewish narrative. Even on my hate-filled couch, I am reminded (if only by Jeopardy…which in some ways means a lot), that our sad story defines us and not what we’ve done as second-class citizens, people of the book, or philosophical arbiters of change.

Of course there is a twinge of irony, the “hate-begetting-hate” in my angst-themed post-work ritual, but I don’t discriminate! I hate everyone on Jeopardy, ESPECIALLY the contestants who embody Jewish stereotypes! (and Alex Trebek’s nearly unpalatable French-Canadian smugness).

Trebek and Blitzer...a double douche silver sandwich.

It’s just that the portrayal of all the histories and movements seem so noble, even if it’s just on Jeopardy, that I wish mine didn’t feel like its categories should have an Itzhak Perlman accompaniment beside it.

More importantly, I probably need to go to bed.