I’ve recently launched KesherPoint, a guide to Kosher Restaurants, Synagogues, and other bits of Jewish life. It’s been a harder task than I had anticipated. Web crawling and NLP have helped a little, but a lot of the data needed to be manually verified if it was to be a useful site. It’s time consuming to figure out which places have closed down and which places have lost their heckscher – which is probably why most people don’t.

But through this process, I’ve started to learn more about Jewish life in Various cities. I learned that my friend Josh from undergrad is now a Rabbi in New Orleans where he is supervising several kosher restaurants in addition to leading a congregation.

It’s also amazing to look at the maps and see the different Jewish geographies in the different cities.