Thursday, June 30, 7:30 pm
Reba and Sam Sandler Family Campus
“Jewish Geography” is a concept many Jews know well—conversations in which one person finds out whose sister went to sleepaway camp with whose cousin, and which suburban temple in Illinois shares a family tie with the big synagogue in New York City.
Who Knows One? brings Jewish geography to a game show format, tying community together to show how everyone is connected. As founder and host Micah Hart puts it, “It’s not who you know, it’s who you know knows.”
Hart will host a live show bringing community back together in Tidewater. Just planning that event unveiled a host of connections between him and Tidewater. Hart’s wife, Hillary Lesser Hart, grew up at Kempsville Conservative Synagogue. When Betsy Karotkin got the news that the Harts were visiting the Lessers this summer, she connected Hart with Betty Ann Levin, United Jewish Federation of Tidewater’s executive vice president/CEO, who shared the opportunity with Robin Mancoll, UJFT chief program officer, whose husband’s aunt, Susan Donn, grew up with Hart’s dad, Macy Hart, in Jackson, Mississippi. Macy Hart is founder of the Institute of Southern Jewish Life and known by many in Tidewater, Virginia, and beyond.
Hart has another connection with Tidewater—Madeline Budman, a Norfolk native, who has been on Who Knows One? as ‘The Chosen One.’
“It was hilarious to watch on Facebook Live while people I had never heard of tried to leverage their connections to search for me,” Budman says. “A couple of possible paths to me were brought up, but eventually I was brought on the Zoom by the assistant director of URJ Kutz Camp who knew me when I was a teen!”
‘The Chosen One’ is the person the show’s contestants need to find by leveraging their own networks. But here’s the twist…no information can be exchanged via social media, texts, or phone calls. Contestants must invite their friends to join a Zoom call. Each person brings another friend onto the call until The Chosen One is found.
Who Knows One? originated on Zoom during the beginning of the pandemic, but Hart recently started taking the show on the road, hosting and meeting contestants live.
“Hilary is from Virginia Beach and grew up there, so we come back to visit her family a handful of times a year,” says Hart. Her parents are David and Renee Lesser.
“I love doing Who Knows One? shows in different communities because it’s a wonderful reminder that no matter how we identify as Jews, we are all connected to each other, and there is such a wonderful spirit of connection and reconnection that flows through the show, both with the live audience and with the people we engage through the game itself,” says Hart.
Hart will host Who Knows One? live at the Reba and Sam Sandler Family Campus on Thursday, June 30 at 7:30 pm. Tickets are $10 through June 23 and $18 beginning June 24 and at the door. Seats are limited. Purchase tickets at JewishVA.org/WhoKnowsOne.
For more information about Arts + Ideas programming, contact Hunter Thomas, director of Arts + Ideas at the United Jewish Federation of Tidewater, at HThomas@UJFT.org.