writing a charity trivia quiz

[dxdtdemon]

My synagogue wants to have a charity written quiz, I guess sort of like a pub quiz, and someone suggested that I should write it. I've never written that kind of a quiz before, and so I'm not sure what a good distribution to follow would be. I realize that lots of these kinds of things are predominantly popular culture, and since many of the people who would likely participate are over 50, I'm guessing that I should skew things more towards 60's, 70's, and 80's things. I'm also not sure how much of it should be about Judaism itself.

[UlyssesInvictus]

Just in case you weren't already, I recommend keeping these questions short--there's a time and place for pyramidality. I agree about the popular culture. Current events also seem to work well, firstly because I guess older people tend to be more news aware, and secondly because in my experience people like being able to recognize what the question was about and talk about. You can probably keep the science, literature, and history to a GK level. Honestly, Jeopardy-style questions always seem to go over well. Good luck! I know you're not describing the most rigorous of competitions, but I always enjoy seeing people have fun at these sort of trivia events.

[vinteuil]

This obviously depends on the kind of people at your synagogue, but I know a good chunk of my synagogue would love nothing more than answering lots of questions on rabbinical and scriptural stuff.

[Stained Diviner]

People at the synagogues I've belonged to wouldn't be excited about "rabbinical and scriptural stuff", but they would love questions on famous Jewish people. I also think that local (as in urban area) history and geography would go over well.

[at your pleasure]

I've been in synagogues that would skew either way honestly(some that would pretty much not want to do anything _tooooo_ religious in a pub quiz and some where you could get away with asking which books of the tanakh have special cantillation or other detailed scripture/rabbinics/"name this holiday celebrated after passover"). Really depends on your audience; my suspicion is that it will be more like Jacob's if the synagogue is conservative/very right-wing reform and more like David's if the synagogue is reform. In that case, I don't think a lot of religious stuff would go over well but you could do a lot of "american Jewish culture" type stuff.

[Kyle]

Several years ago, I co-wrote the biweekly Magdalen College Bar Charity Pub Quiz, which with a buy-in of £1/person run on eleven occasions during the year managed to raise fully $1,000 to be split between two charities. I mention this in order to point out that it is actually possible to raise some real money in this manner. Hopefully your quiz will be a hit!

I would recommend that you divide your quiz into different categories. This would allow you to have a variety of different things, including perhaps a single round about a Jewish-interest topic, without worrying about whether you needed to suffuse the entire question set with that theme. It also helps maintain people's interest as you move from round to round.

What we did to some success was to have six rounds. The first round was a picture round that we passed out in advance and allowed people to look at as they were getting settled. This kept people from getting bored before we were ready to start. Rounds two through six each had seven questions. There isn't any magic to the number seven; it's just the number we decided that would give us the ideal number of questions. Rounds two and three were themed rounds about particular topics, announced ahead of time. In your quiz, one of these topics could be about something related to Judaism. Round four was a music round where we played snippets of seven songs (one classical and one each from the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s), where people got half a point for naming the correct artist and half a point for the correct song title. Round five was a "connection round" where people had to figure out the connection that linked all the answers. Round six was a "50/50 wipeout round" where every question had a choice of two answers, and where people could decide to answer or leave it blank, and where any single incorrect answer would cause a team to "wipe out" and leave them with a total score of zero for the round.

I highly, highly recommend having a connection round. One time in the late summer of 2012, I was with a bunch of people in the Bear (Oxford's oldest pub) playing the quiz. The quizzes have to get easier during the summer because the regulars go off to do research and the city gets invaded by American undergraduates. Neil Armstrong had just died, and several of the rounds of the quiz were explicitly about him. A group of visiting Alabamans had not done well in the initial round of the quiz, so they started complaining rather loudly about the experience of participating in a British pub quiz (an experience which, mind you, they had volunteered to have). Accordingly, they pulled out their phones and blatantly started looking up all the questions. The guy running the quiz told them not to do this, but they didn't pay him any attention. Once they started looking up all the answers, they began to do quite well. Going into the connection round, we were tied with them. The first question was about One Direction and the second about smallpox and the third about Cinderella's evil stepsisters, etc. They looked up every one of these questions on their phones and got them all right. Fortunately, they were unable to Google the final question, which asked "What is the connection between your answers?" So in a Neil Armstrong-themed pub quiz a few days after Neil Armstrong had died, they turned in a paper listing a series of answers containing the words one, small, step, for, man, one, giant, leap, for, and mankind, followed by a question mark in the 11th spot because they couldn't Google what connected the answers. My team won by one point. Was this not justice? And all because of the connection round.

[Joshua Rutsky]

Apparently, some Alabamians suck. I am SHOCKED by this.

On the synagogue quiz issue, I have had lots of fun with rounds like "Who is more likely to know X - the rabbi or a ________?" with obscure words from hebrew, yiddish, or anything that sounds like it might be Talmudic. It isn't hard, as others have said, to use Judaism as a thematic idea--entertainment questions about Jewish figures, lit questions about Jewish authors, music questions about anything but Matisyahu, etc.

If you can dig up a copy of Two Live Jew: Kosher as I Wanna Be from the internet somewhere, so much the better for your inter-round music.

Best of luck!