Reboot’s New Model for Jewish Cultural Production
Where does Jewish culture come from? Today, the best answer might be the Utah desert.
Since 2002, an organization called Reboot has gathered a network of 280 culturally influential Jews at annual retreats near Park City, Utah to talk about contemporary Jewish life. Part think tank, part social network, part exclusive club, Reboot takes ideas conceived at the retreats and plays a behind-the-scenes role in turning them into cultural products for unaffiliated Jews. Well-funded and alternative in outlook, it has further blurred the line between the Jewish establishment’s approach to Jewish culture and the grassroots approach of the alt-y Jewish scene.
Lou Cove, Reboot’s executive director, calls his group a “catalyst to the catalysts.” Its most well-known project to date is Guilt & Pleasure, a high-gloss, high-concept Jewish magazine conceived by Reboot members and published by Reboot. Other projects include Reboot Stereophonic, a record label that releases collections of forgotten American Jewish pop music, and 10Q, a web application that helps users reconsider Rosh Hashanah. Reboot was behind The Tribe, a widely distributed web video about Barbie and American Judaism, and books like Bar Mitzvah Disco (Crown, 2005) and Camp Camp (Crown, 2008), kitschy reappraisals of late 20th century Jewish rites of passage.
Taken as a whole, these initiatives feel edgy, almost self-consciously so. Cove characterizes Reboot as being “on the fringe” of the Jewish institutional world. Of course, like much of the new Jewish culture, its activities are supported entirely by mainstream Jewish charitable foundations, including the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies, Steven Spielberg’s Righteous Persons Foundation, the Slingshot Fund, and others.
What separates Reboot from its peer institutions (well-funded Jewish cultural efforts like Heeb magazine, the Six Points Fellowship, and JDub Records) is its network-based model, through which a few select tastemakers are recruited to create culture for the young Jewish masses. It’s one of a number of unrelated Jewish networks that have appeared over the past few years, including ROI, an annual summit in Jerusalem with a special focus on developing Birthright alumni programming, and the PresenTense Institute, an entrepreneurial fellowship with a Zionist angle.
Reboot’s top-down model of cultural production has been met with some resentment among the group’s target audience, particularly Jewish artists. Adam Dorn, a musician and a Rebooter of three years, says that upon joining the network, he discovered that Reboot “had a bit of a reputation in the Jewish world as being mysterious and very selective.” When a fellow musician learned that Dorn had been invited into the Reboot network, he said, “she went on to tell me how difficult it was to become a member and how seemingly snooty [it] was to her.”
Cove says that the network is self-nominating, and that he doesn’t worry about it being perceived as elitist.
Before joining Reboot, Cove was the vice president of the National Yiddish Book Center, which preserves Yiddish-language books from destruction and archives them at its facility in Amherst, Massachusetts. Cove says that he sees his work at Reboot as a continuation of his work at the Yiddish Book Center. Rebooters, he says, work “to help create a new literary and cultural cannon” that deals with the same issues of identity that were salient to Yiddish authors.
In his new position at the head of the Reboot network, Cove says that he’s had the ear of the Jewish establishment. “They are all eager, desperate would be a more accurate way of saying it, to connect to a younger generation and an unaffiliated audience,” he says.
Rabbi Sharon Brous, the leader of the pioneering Los Angeles spiritual community IKAR and a Reboot faculty member, has been involved with the organization since its earliest days. She says that she was initially skeptical of the retreat concept. “I thought, ‘I have no interest in going away in some experimental project with people unaffiliated with Jewish life.'” Seven years later, she feels quite differently. “I think it should be mandated that every rabbi sit through Reboot and listen,” she says.
Brous says that she first heard of Reboot through a series of “strange calls” from a “strange man” when she was a young rabbi in New York. That man was Roger Bennett, a British-born man-about-town and the senior vice president of the Andrea & Charles Bronfman Philanthropies. A co-founder of Reboot, Bennett has been a guiding force behind the organization. He declined to be interviewed for this article.
So, is Reboot the Brill Building of Jewish cultural outreach? Adam Dorn isn’t sure. “I left my first summit thinking I was part of a think tank. But [that] sort of subsided after a matter of weeks,” Dorn said. Eventually, he decided that the Reboot network was “more of a club.” He has happily contributed to Reboot projects, but the programmatic rigor he had expected seems lacking. Dorn isn’t complaining, however. Where else, he asked, “could you meet the world’s foremost scholar on Jewish wrestlers of the 1920s, or the single best [human] database of the world’s Jewish delis, or hold a meeting about the virtues of the shvitz and make friends for life over a 60 minute B.S. session in a steam room?” In all, he said, “it’s a great social circle of great people doing some great things.”
