Jewish studies professor wins big on Jeopardy!

The most notable message Melissa Klapper got during her four-night run recently on Jeopardy! didn’t come because the Jewish studies scholar was unable to answer a question about Yom Kippur. It also wasn’t an unkind note from a game-show stickler who believed she’d gotten credit for a wrong response.

Instead, it was an email from a past student who recognised herself in the story Klapper told as part of her self-introductory stage banter – a staple of the game show. Klapper, who teaches history at Rowan University in New Jersey, described accusing a student of having plagiarised her paper.

The student then replied, Klapper recalled, that she “didn’t know [it] was plagiarised when she bought it”. The anecdote yielded laughs from host Ken Jennings and the two co-contestants whom Klapper later defeated to notch her third win.

After the episode aired, Klapper heard from the former student. “She wrote to me to apologise. She’s a teacher now and, I think, is more understanding of why what she did was really not good. And I really appreciated it. It was kind of brave of her to get in touch with me after all these years.”

The experience was a fitting highlight of Klapper’s run on the show, which ended with a third-place finish and total winnings of $60,100. JTA