Ignite Chanukah 9 Shines

Ten brave souls lit up Rembrandt Yards Wednesday night with their “Sparks” — the five-minute presentations that make up any Ignite gathering, world-wide — while nearly 100 young adults absorbed their wisdom, along with alcohol, latkas, sufganyot and other tasty treats. The Ignite movement’s motto: “Enlighten me, but quickly.” One speaker likened this to Hillel’s feat of reciting the whole of the Torah while standing on one foot.  The rest is commentary.

David “Doogie” Levine of Flatiron Tribe/Boulder JCC served as MC for the evening, and kicked off the presentations with a hilarious improvised Spark based on random text messages shouted from the audience.  This was particularly challenging since he already had his 20 slides selected and loaded ahead of time, so he had to match the slides to the content of the selected topic, “Do you have a dreidel cookie cutter?”

Topics ranged from “How Cannabis, Humor & Schtupping Helps Save My Wife’s Life from CANCER,” to “How to Survive the Nazi Zombie Apocalypse” and lots of interesting things in between. Event sponsors Milk and Honey Farm, Moishe House Boulder, and Hazon also got to do mini-Sparks.

Here is the list of presenters:

• Leyla Eraybar: The Modern Hanukkah Story

• Jeff Ulman: How Cannabis, Humor, & Schtupping helps Same My Wife’s Life from Cancer

• Nitzan Mesika: Israeli American

• Chava Tzemah: Chanukah: Rededicating Ourselves to our values

• Hindy Finman: 1,2,3,4 Nice to meet you

• Milk & Honey Farm-Becca Gan Levy

• Moishe House-Yael Greenberg

• Hazon-Noah Herreid

• Gary Brandt: Contemporary Correspondence

• Robyn Ronen: Bikur Cholim: Five Rules for visiting the sick

• Orit Manham: Israeli Woman in Tech

• Dave Rogers: Jews and the Phone

• Yeal Greenberg: Running with Scissors: Rethinking Conventional Advice

• Spencer Lazaroff: Navigating an increasingly anti-Semitic Society as a Jew

BJN will be posting this year’s Sparks on our YouTube channel in the next few days, and will update this post with a link.  Twitter users can see the evening play out in @IgniteChanukah’s feed, or searching the Twitterverse for #ignitechanukah2018.

To see more pictures from the event, click here or on any of the pictures in the slide show at the top of the post.