10Q is an online series of questions, one a day for ten days, created by rebooters Nicola Behrman and Ben Greenman. The questions, ranging from personal to community, family to work, serve as triggers for High Holiday reflection. Participants’ emailed their answers to a secure online vault just after Yom Kippur 2008. Next year, right before Rosh Hashanah, the answers will be sent back to each person and the whole process will begin again. Over 1000 users participated in the 10Q pilot program…  

Interested? Check out:
www.renewyear.com
http://www.jpost.com
http://www.notcot.org

Interested in signing up? Email us. 

A documentary sheds light on the Arab-Israeli experience and a community’s beloved soccer team.

During discussions at the 2004 Reboot Summit, Rebooter Michael Cohen wondered aloud about the state of Arab-Israeli citizens. Having raised the issue with the right people, at the right place, Cohen found himself on a flight to Israel only six weeks later with documentary filmmaker Chris Browne. Cohen, a former music industry executive who had recently started his own production company, and Browne (whose debut film, A League of Ordinary Gentlemen, documented the National Bowling League’s takeover by five Microsoft executives) had together begun what would become a three-year effort to bring to the world one of the most improbable chapters in recent Middle-East history. Almost as unlikely as the story was Michael Cohen’s participation in such an initiative—before his involvement with Reboot, he had never before considered working to explore the idea of Jewish identity. The result of his exploration is a film about Bnei Sakhnin, a soccer team in an Israeli Arab town, with a Jewish coach, both Arab and Jewish players, and a fan-base that lives and dies with every result.

Sons of Sakhnin United is a film about more than just an against-all-odds sporting triumph. It is about a nation’s clashing efforts to be both a Jewish and a Democratic state—a state in which one in five Israeli citizens is Arab. Reboot’s aim is to use Sons of Sakhnin United as an accessible way into a conversation that the American Jewish community is just beginning to have about Arab-Israelis. Sons of Sakhnin United premiered at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival—enjoying sold out screenings throughout its run—and screened at the 2007 Jerusalem Film Festival. The film garnered glowing press in both Sports Illustrated and Variety. In addition, the Inter-Agency Task Force on Israeli Arab Issues is screening the film at college campuses across America, using the film as a mechanism to educate young Jews about Jewish-Arab issues in Israel.

Reporter Andrew Jacobs’ documentary captures the end of an era for holocaust survivors who have lived their lives to the fullest every summer in the Catskills.

In 2005, Andrew Jacobs wrote a six-part series for The New York Times about summer life in the “Borscht Belt.” His participation in the 2005 Reboot Summit inspired him to return for an extended summer stay—long enough to fully capture on film the friends who had laughed, danced, and stayed up too late together, every summer for the last 30 years. The result is the documentary, Four Seasons Lodge.

In the 1970s, nearly 100 Holocaust survivors from Austria, Germany, Hungary, and Poland created a sprawling retreat in the Catskills, but after three decades, the time came for the lodgers to sell their beloved colony. Jacobs explains, “I felt compelled to document these people who had survived such atrocity, but had managed to escape the darkness and bitterness that afflicts so many Holocaust survivors, and embrace life. I believe these folks can teach the world something about how to move past unimaginable horror and trauma and find the sweetness in friendship, family, humor, and in their case, dancing the macarena late into the night. Reboot helped inspire and embolden me to take on the project. I had no filmmaking experience but Reboot people pushed me forward and offered me their wisdom and their connections.”

Jacobs teamed up with legendary documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles (Salesman, Gimme Shelter, Grey Gardens) to make Four Seasons Lodge, and the Reboot network was instrumental in facilitating the production aspects of the film, as well as its development, even organizing a fundraising event. Four Seasons Lodge is currently in post-production.

For more info, please visit http://www.fourseasonsmovie.org

A record label uses music as a way to make young people think about history.

Reboot Stereophonic has been developed as a work of passion by an eclectic team of music industry tastemakers who met at a Reboot Summit. Courtney Holt (formerly at Interscope, now Executive Vice President at MTV), David Katznelson (music industry veteran, former Vice President of A&R at Warner Bros., now the head of an independent label group, the Birdman Recording Group), and Josh Kun (author, New York Times contributor, and associate professor in the Annenberg School of Communications at U.S.C.), along with Roger Bennett (co-founder of Reboot) have since traveled across the country to chase down rare tunes and the stories of the musicians who made them—from New York to Los Angeles, from Puerto Rico to the Catskills.

When the Stereophonic crew sat down for the first time, they discovered that the Rebooting audiophiles beside them not only shared a passion for amazing lost vinyl, but actually possessed some of the forgotten records themselves. Early on in the development of Reboot Stereophonic, it became clear that the task at hand went far beyond music preservation. It was the preservation of history. Stereophonic has become like a Smithsonian for lost Jewish audio, but without the stuffiness. It is a valuable and modern tool for conversation about Jewish identity, but also, this is music you might actually want to throw on at a party, music that will make you laugh, will make you think—stuff you have probably never heard before and definitely will not find on any Jewish music compilation your Hebrew School teacher gave you to get in touch with your roots.


Reboot Stereophonic’s first release was a re-mastered version of Irving Fields’ ground-breaking 1959 recording, Bagels & Bongos (May, 2005). Using Latin music as an idiom of Jewish expression, Bagels & Bongos features mambo interpretations of such numbers as “My Yiddishe Momme” and “Bei Mir Bist Du Shon,” as well as “Havannah Negillah.”

God Is a Moog (November, 2005) is a double album featuring recordings from 1968 to 1974, in which pioneering musician, and Moog keyboard innovator, Gershon Kingsley attempted to fuse the machine and the divine. Using his creativity, the Moog, and a few choice proverbs, Kingsley recorded everything from meditations on identity and freedom, to a rock opera for the Sabbath (written to include a gospel choir).

Jewface (November, 2006) is the world’s first and only anthology of Jewish minstrel songs, featuring works from Irving Berlin, Gus Kahn, Fanny Brice, Billy Murray, and other vaudeville greats from the turn of the 20th century. Included are such rare, old-school gems as “Cohen Owes Me 97 Dollars,” “Under the Matzos Tree,” and “I’m a Yiddish Cowboy.” Jewface unveils a forgotten dirty secret of pop music history; that some of the first hit records ever made were fiendishly catchy musical lampoons, created by Jews, for Jews, and actually loaded with anti-Semitic stereotypes.

Reboot Stereophonic’s fourth release is a re-mastered version of the 1959 classic Folk Songs for Far Out Folk (July, 2007) from legendary jazz innovator, Fred Katz.

For additional information about Reboot Stereophonic releases please visit www.rebootstereophonic.com

A quarterly magazine that’s “making Jews talk more.”

Inspired by the “open space” style of conversation at the 2002 Reboot Summit, author and journalist Mireille Silcoff began a trend of intimate discussion groups—called salons—which started off in her living room and today take place all over the country, and beyond. As the thirst and number of salon participants grew, the need for a related, focused text became apparent, and thus, the Guilt & Pleasure (G & P) quarterly was born; founded upon the belief that a good argument, especially on issues of community and identity, has become too rare a thing.

Today, G & P boasts an extraordinary assembly of popular essayists, novelists, journalists, and historians. Its editorial board includes novelists such as Jonathan Safran Foer and Gary Shteyngart, journalists A.J. Jacobs (author of The Know-It-All) and Dany Levy (founder of Daily Candy, a free daily email guide to what’s hot, new, and undiscovered), as well as academics Jack Kugelmass (professor of anthropology at the University of Florida in Gainesville) and Nathaniel Deutsch (professor of religion at Swarthmore College). Meanwhile, the self-organized salons which inspired the magazine still go on at bars in New York and Oakland, in living rooms in Boston and Baltimore, coffee houses in Chicago and Denver, restaurants in Miami and Montreal, a nightclub in San Francisco, a lounge in Los Angeles, and even at a bookstore in Siegen, Germany. At one salon in Paris, a G & P reader actually translated the magazine into French so he could engage his friends and then write about the experience for Le Monde Magazine. In addition, G & P has attracted the interest of more affiliated, young Jews who are also hungry for cultural content; Hillel, Birthright Israel, and local J.C.C. groups have all used G & P as a focal point for organized salons.

Each issue of Guilt & Pleasure is based around a central theme, such as the Home Issue, the Fight Issue, the Magic Issue, the Big Issue (about the Middle East), and the Healthy Issue. All issues have a varied mix of contributors and writing styles, including fiction, memoir, archival, and reported works as a means to be both topical and historical. G & P is sold nationwide at Barnes & Noble, Borders, and independent bookstores.

For more information on Guilt & Pleasure, visit: http://www.guiltandpleasure.com