Writer and producer Lauren Schaffel—known for her work as a child actor in Will and Grace, Still Standing, and as the voice of Lucy in the Peanuts series—shares the deeply personal and sharply funny story behind her award-winning short musical comedy film Catalogue of Noses. Inspired by her own experience growing up Jewish in Hollywood and getting a nose job at 16. Reboot helped create educational materials for Catalogue of Noses, to open up conversations about identity, beauty,and authenticity. In this piece for Reboot, Schaffel reflects on what it means to reshape ourselves to fit in, and how storytelling can help us reclaim those pieces we’ve lost along the way. Read more on Catalogue of Noses and get the guide here.
The new book, My Year of Really Bad Dates, mixes heartbreak, humor and a whole lot of chutzpah to turn romantic disaster into deeply Jewish art. In this candid and sharply funny memoir, Rachel J. Lithgow, a veteran of Jewish cultural life, shares how a Jewish lens shapes not just her love life, but her entire way of finding meaning (and comedy) in the chaos. She shares with Reboot a reminder that telling our stories, especially the messy ones, is a sacred act of survival and connection. Read more from Lithgow here.
What does it mean to make Jewish art today? With her new play The Matriarchs, playwright Liba Vaynberg dives into that question through the story of six teenage girls at a weekly Talmud lesson in suburban New Jersey. Funny, sharp and deeply human, the play reimagines the overlooked women of the Torah while exploring friendship, faith and growing up beyond orthodoxy. As it premieres this September at TheaterLab, we had actor and writer Rebecca Salzhauer sit down with Vaynberg and fellow playwright Anna Ziegler to talk Jewish identity, theater and creating art for this moment. Read more here.
On Rosh Hashanah, the sound of the shofar rang out as it always had—familiar, steady, ancient. But this time, in 2023, something shifted for Greg Sobol. The blast of Tekiah was not just a ritual note; it was a spark, a summons toward something new. Just weeks earlier, over a “L’Chaim” with his rabbi, Sobol found himself asking a question that lingered long after the glasses were raised: why wasn’t tequila ever part of the ritual? That moment in services, when the shofar sounded, the idea crystallized and led him to a journey across fields of blue agave in Jalisco, through traditions of his Jewish faith and Mexican culture, and into the heart of a vision—one that could unite both. Out of memory, ritual, and family came his new product, Tekiah, a premium kosher tequila born to honor lineage, uplift community, and remind us that joy, like heritage, is sacred. Read more about his journey here.
At Reboot, we’re fascinated by the ways personal and cultural histories intertwine, carrying echoes of memory, resilience and creative inheritance across generations. In his new album Heirloom, musician and storyteller Gabriel Kahane, Reboot Network member, explores his family’s past, shaped by escape, survival, and deep engagement with both German and Jewish musical traditions that informs the music he creates today. At the work’s center is a movement honoring his paternal grandmother, Hannelore, who escaped Germany in early 1939, arriving later that year in Los Angeles, where Kahane and his father were both born. It’s a meditation on what we inherit, what we transform, and what we leave for the next generation. Read more here.