Here’s a story I love to tell. I am Jewish (that’s not the story). When I graduated from college, I moved to Boston. One night I went out with a non-Jewish friend of mine and we met up at a bar with a girl who was Jewish. She was from Michigan; I am from Mississippi.

Immediately after we sat down in our booth, she and I started asking each other questions to see if we knew anyone in common. Despite the distance of our hometowns, we quickly realized we knew about a dozen of the same people—a dozen of the same Jews.

At one point in the evening, she excused herself to use the restroom, and my friend looked at me with mouth agape. “What … was that?” he asked, befuddled. “You two are from completely different parts of the country, but you know so many people in common.”

“Right,” I said. “So?” I didn’t understand his confusion.

“If I met anyone from somewhere else who knew someone I knew,” he said, “my head would explode!”

It was at that moment that I realized that what the Jewish girl and I had just experienced wasn’t something everyone necessarily understood. The little game that she and I had just played, but which our Gentile friend never had, was Jewish Geography. It’s a common parlor game throughout the American Jewish world and beyond. It’s a search for connection, for kinship. And it’s loads of fun.

It comes in many forms, but here’s a garden-variety example. Say you meet someone new on a work Zoom call. You’re waiting for a couple stragglers to join, so you idly pass the time by getting to know the other person. You start to ask some questions to establish their background.

“So where are you from?”

“Cincinnati.”

“Oh nice. Where’d you go to high school?” This is an under-appreciated aspect of high-level Jewish Geography—having enough regional knowledge to know how people in the town would know each other. In cities like Cincinnati, or St. Louis, high school matriculation is everything.

“Sycamore.”

When Cincinnati is invoked in Jewish Geography, Sycamore High is always a good guess. For St. Louis, try Parkway Central or Ladue. For Newton, Mass., the proper question is, “Newton North or Newton South?”

“What year did you graduate?” This establishes a timeline, now you can narrow your focus of who they might know that you know.

“1998.”

And now the payoff:

“My cousin Shira was class of 1996! Did you know her?”

This is a huge world, with billions of people. It’s easy to feel like a grain of sand, insignificant. Then you play Jewish Geography and learn the incredible ways we are connected to each other. It’s soul-nourishing.

You might ask similar questions about other places they might have lived, or worked. You might inquire about organizations they’ve been part of. This person may or may not know your cousin, or your friend from college, or your bunkmate from summer camp. If they do, great! You can reminisce on how each of you know them, their weird dietary restrictions, their prowess at Words with Friends—really, it doesn’t matter. Jewish Geography is not about how often you succeed, just that you tried to find commonality.

This is a huge world, with billions of people. It’s easy to feel like a grain of sand, insignificant. Then you play Jewish Geography and learn the incredible ways we are connected to each other. It’s soul-nourishing.

The links people share are staggering, and I’m a junkie for them. Jewish Geography is so much fun I started a game show, Who Knows One?, centered around the game’s premise. It started as an internet show during COVID-19 lockdowns, and has evolved into a touring live show. As part of the show, we invite people to share their Jewish Geography stories, and we’ve uncovered some doozies.

Take this one from Jennifer Rubin and Rebekah Jordan, from an episode of the original internet show, that begins with an order for kippot, or yarmulkes, for a bat mitzvah and leads to a lifelong friendship:

Or this one from Jamie Beth Cohen of Lancaster, Pa., about an unlikely but meaningful run-in with a copier salesman:

Or how about this one, a personal favorite of mine, that literally happened to me in November in Valencia, Spain, where I live (and where, I might add, there are only maybe a couple hundred Jews).

My family and I had gone to see a movie, and as we were coming out of the theater, someone approached me and asked if I was Micah Hart. Surprised, I said yes, and the person proceeded to tell me that a mutual friend of ours in Nashville had told him to find me when they moved to Valencia. So far, random, but not so crazy.

But then he told me that when this friend told him I lived here, he assumed she was talking about a different person, at which point he pulled out his cellphone and showed me a picture of himself from college—with my cousin, also named Micah Hart.

“That’s crazy!” I said. “How did you figure all of this out just now, when we were all in a darkened movie theater?”

At which point he explained that his wife is a huge fan of House Hunters International, and they had seen an episode we were on several months back, and so they recognized me, my wife, and my kids from the show.

Bananas.

This search for connection is all fun and games, but it has a utilitarian purpose as well, one that feeds the spirit in addition to accomplishing a task. You’ve probably seen it on Facebook at some point—someone will post that they are trying to find someone, or return a lost item, and ask if anyone can help them. That’s when the positive power of social media springs to life.

Late last year, a person reached out to Who Knows One?, trying to find a person missing a prayerbook. She had been sitting in a synagogue in Krakow, Poland, and noticed the prayerbook she was using had an English-language inscription on the first page that appeared to be a meaningful, heartfelt message to (presumably) the book’s owner. Instinctively, she felt the prayerbook must have been left there by someone on accident, so she took it and decided to see if she could reunite the book with whoever left it there.

She emailed us to see if we could help her out, we posted a photo of the inscription on Facebook, and the community sprang to life. People shared the post, tagged friends they thought might have potential leads, and sure enough, less than twenty-four hours later, we’d figured out who the book belonged to. As it turns out, he had accidentally left it there, and was very sad it was gone. The whole thing was incredible, and speaks to the intrinsic good vibes that come from making connections and feeling connected.

Do you need to be Jewish to play Jewish Geography? Not at all. I’ve played versions of it during my time working in sports and in social media, and it works easily in any industry where you might move around a lot, like entertainment or hospitality. And Gentiles can play the game, too, even if their stories are, alas, less likely to involve yarmulkes.