Family Jew’d, based on the classic game show Family Feud, is a great activity in which the whole Seder crowd, including adults, can take part. It’s also excellent for an older class to lead at your school’s model Seder.

In the original game show, families competed to name the most popular responses to survey questions. In our classroom version, students write their own questions about Pesach traditions, use their class as the survey pool, and then use those questions and survey responses to be the game show host in leading Family Jew’d.

Step One: Let’s write some great survey questions.

A successful game of Family Jew’d can go as many as ten rounds, so your student game show hosts will need ten interesting questions.

Here are five questions to get you started. The students in your class should come up with five more. To that end, ask each student to write out a question about Pesach in general or the Seder in particular. They should be questions that will generate lots of different answers from the other students in the class (the most popular answers by the students in the class will become the correct answers, i.e. the survey responses) in the game.

Five questions to start with:

1.      What is your favorite Pesach food?

2.      What is your favorite part of the Seder?

3.      Name something on the Seder plate.

4.      What is your favorite Pesach song?

5.      How many days into Pesach are you before you get tired of matzah?

Now have your class write five more. (If you’d rather skip the question-writing aspect of this activity, here are an additional five questions you can use, but we really recommend you have students generate the questions. Additional questions: What is your favorite thing to eat when Pesach ends? Which of the four children are you most like? Name one of the ten plagues.

Where is the first place you’d look for the afikoman? Name a Pesach song.)

Step Two: What Does the Survey Say?

The correct answers in the Family Jew’d game are the most popular ones. So, choose ten questions from among those written by the class and the questions provided in this exercise. Read each question in turn and have all students write down one answer to each question. Collect the answers and use them to determine which answers are the three most popular. The most common answer becomes answer one, and so on. Now you have everything you need to host the Family Jew’d game show—ten questions and the three most popular answers to each one.

Step Three: Let’s Host a Game Show!

Before the Seder, jot down survey questions and companion answers on index cards, with one question per card.Decide how many questions you want to ask, based on how long you want the game to run, since each round takes a few minutes. Assign a Seder attendee to be scorekeeper. Feel free to round up some plastic frogs or other token prizes to award the winning team.

The game show host (or team of hosts) divides Seder attendees into two teams. If this is a family Seder, try to ensure that each team has a similar balance of adults and kids, and that any Seder newcomers are also spread out. Have each team pick a person to be the official team spokesperson, who is responsible for giving their team’s guesses to the host.

The game begins with the reading of the first survey question. Each team spokesperson is positioned where the host can see them. The teams compete to see who can buzz in first with an answer by having their spokesperson raise his or her hand; the teams give their answer in the order in which they raised their hand, and they can’t use an answer that was already given by the other team. The family that gave the most popular answer gets two points on your scoreboard; if the other team also gave an answer that matches one of the survey responses, they get one point. They get zero points if they guess something that was not one of the survey responses.

Now, the team that gave the most popular answer takes over game play; the host now asks the team to confer quickly and then announce the rest of the answers to the question. Every wrong answer they come up with is a strike, and each team is allowed three strikes. After the third strike, game play turns over to the other team. For each correct answer a team gets, they get one point. The team that finishes with the most points wins!

by Andy Neusner