2022 was an ambitious, exciting year for Reboot! We launched a new production arm, Reboot Studios, which was announced with a splash by Deadline. Reboot Studios, which funded 15 diverse grantees, will significantly expand our ability to create new projects that will grow our audience and further our mission to use art to educate, inspire and create movements. Reboot Studios provides seed funding for and develops Jewish content across theater, television, film, podcasts, music and publishing. Notable projects in the works at Reboot Studios include:

• The film Boom from #1 New York Times bestseller Adam Mansbach (Go the F**k to Sleep)
• Podcasts The Amtlai Tapes from Transparent creator Joey Soloway,  Kitchen Radio from Regine and Nathalie Basha and Untitled B-Mitzvah Project from Adam Kantor & Charly Jaffe
• The one-man play Origin Story by William DeMeritt
• Short films, The Anne Frank Gift Shop from Mickey Rapkin and Uncut Gems from Jessie Kanhweiler

As we look excitedly ahead to our Studio project releases (learn more about the first round of funding here), we look back and reflect on our impact with pride and satisfaction. Over the past three years, Reboot projects and productions have reached more than five million people!

Here are some of the highlights over the last year alone:

We have continued with a rigorous conversation series, Reboot Ideas, offering a place for the Jewish conversations you won’t hear anyplace else, like digging into the implications and unintended consequences of Web 3 and other emerging technologies like AI, analyzing the erosion of our democracy and civil rights and ways to counter them, and exploring the common themes of loss, renewal and transformation found in every death. One of our marquee moments of 2022 was the Reboot Ideas event supporting the HBO film The Survivor with director Barry Levinson, actor Ben Foster and producer Matti Leshem, moderated by Sami Sage, co-founder of Betches Media in a deeply personal discussion about the nature of survival, PTSD, and generational trauma. We also created a companion conversation kit that digs into the themes of PTSD and impossible ethical choices in the Emmy-nominated film.

In addition to working with HBO, this year, Nickelodeon engaged Reboot to help develop several key materials for their 2022 programming for Jewish American Heritage Month. Given the uptick in cultural sensitivity awareness, Nickelodeon discovered Reboot’s strength as a bridge between popular and Jewish culture and engaged us to review their programs and create complementary curricular content.

We launched the Reboot Presents podcast network with the release of The Jewish Bizarre, launching with Only Murders in the Shtetl and peeking into the strangest corners of Jewish history. We stayed up all night for ‘Round Midnight Reconsidered, the epic live and streamed eight hour reinterpretation of one of Thelonious Monk’s most revered ballads. We pressed the vinyl version of our groundbreaking new score for the 1921 classic horror film The Golem: How He Came Into the World. We produced a digital series, Coming of Age from Silver Screen Studios and Reboot, featuring profiles of an incredible group of older Detroiters and partnered with the Contemporary Jewish Museum on the Silver Screen Studios “It’s All Relative” project capturing real time reactions and family stories from visitors to Rebooter Gillian Laub’s “Family Matters” exhibit.

Our blog covered an extensive range of topics this year. We opened our ears with a feature on Yiddish folk songs buried in the archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the sounds and stories of North African Jewish artists who found themselves silenced and subjugated under fascist rule during the Second World War.

We explored antisemitism and intersectionality with Reboot’s new rabbinic educator, Rabbi Kendell Pinkney, who joined our team this fall. We asked why Jews don’t celebrate Halloween while unearthing the Jewish mystical rituals that are Halloween aligned. We broke the Yom Kippur fast the Persian way, celebrated Passover around the world and looked at the Jewish roots of cannabis.

The year’s accomplishments were ambitious. We feel proud of the questions we asked and topics we probed through multiple mediums. We could not have done this work without you. We are grateful to be on this collective Jewish journey together. We look towards the new year with hope and curiosity. Thank you.

Reboot’s programs are made possible as a result of generous donors.

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