Non-Profit Starts Production Company to Back More Jewish Content in Arts and Culture

Shiryn Ghermezian

Reboot Studios. Photo: Provided.

The Jewish non-profit Reboot announced on Tuesday that it has launched its own production company to use seed funding to help develop Jewish content in the arts.

Reboot Studios will also provide creators with mentorship and resources to help further their projects, to include docuseries, plays, podcasts, books, films, theater, record albums, photography projects, digital and multimedia art.

“Driven by the belief that art influences our world, enriches our lives and has the power to educate, inspire, create movements and change the way we think, Reboot Studios will tell stories through a Jewish lens about the shared human experience,” Reboot, which was founded in 2001, said on its website.

Members of Reboot Studios’ advisory board, who will help guide funded projects, include industry leaders from Showtime, Searchlight Pictures and Amazon; producers; production heads; and songwriters.

“The Jewish tradition is, at its heart, a storytelling tradition,” said David Kohan, a Reboot Studios investor and the co-creator of the former television show “Will & Grace.” He added, “What Reboot Studios aims to do is continue this tradition of storytelling, but instead of stories, they call it content, and instead of stone tablets or parchment, they use every type of media platform that exists in 2022.”

Past works funded by Reboot include “Saturday Night Seder,” a virtual 2020 Passover production that raised $3.5 million for the CDC Foundation’s Coronavirus Emergency Response Fund, and the launch of the HBO film “The Survivor.”

Reboot Studios’ current projects include the “Boom,” a film adaptation of the memoir “I Had a Brother Once,” by New York Times bestselling author Adam Mansbach. The screenplay is about a rapper’s growing relationship to Judaism on the first anniversary of his brother’s suicide.

The company is also working on a scripted television series called “Tribe,” inspired by true events about a historically Black university in Jim Crow-era Baltimore that sponsored a Jewish professor in danger of being deported back to Nazi Germany.

Reboot’s network of creators now consists of more than 650 Jewish (and “Jew-ish”) influencers, its website says, including creatives behind “The Office” and “Orange is the New Black”; Broadway stars from “Dear Evan Hansen,” “La La Land,” and “Rent”; and others in tech, media, and non-profits.