Times: Jews Reboot in Exclusive Conference

There is a secretive group called Reboot, which the Times tells us, "since 2002 has conducted an annual conference for young, affluent Jews to discuss their ethnic and religious identity, in between spa treatments and walks among the ponderosa pines of the Wasatch Mountains."

We know little about this conference because we are not in on the secret.

Here is how the Times ends the article.

As prayers were set to begin, an elderly Jewish woman entered, her dress shimmering in the candlelight, her blond bouffant framing the accentuated makeup around her eyes. It was Mr. Lau-Lavie dressed in drag as an incarnation of Esther, the biblical Queen of Persia.

“Drag in its best is court jester,” Mr. Lau-Lavie said. “People are so ambivalent about religion, I thought this was a way to do it.”

Mr. Pollack watched in awe. “It was definitely comic,” he said. Indeed Mr. Lau-Lavie was a hit with many that year.

“He said something about God being a black woman,” Ms. Soloway said. “No one ever said this in temple. I felt like I wanted to follow him around all day. He was like Jim Jones, and I wanted to drink his Kool-Aid.”

Mr. Pollack was less moved by his Reboot experience. “I liked a lot of the people I met there, but I don’t think it changed me,” he said. And Mr. Rushkoff was downright critical. “Its success seems dependent on a certain kind of insidery elitism,” he said. “People don’t want to frame Reboot as an effort to market Judaism to Jews. I think it is hard not to see it as that.” (Mr. Bennett responded: “Reboot is a funny thing. It is different things to different people.”)

Mr. Rollman, for his part, still questions what it means to be a Jew. “Reboot has not provided me a magical solution,” he said. “But it has given me comfort in allowing me to make my relationship with Judaism my own.”

But Ms. Behrman declares herself utterly transformed.

“It’s ridiculous how Jew-y I’ve become,” she said.