Jerusalem — It has come to Ramallah, Tel Aviv, Jaffa and even the Gaza Strip. It connects and inspires people around the world through its one day conferences. Presented in up to18-minutes per round, in big halls or out of a box, it has touched billions of people.
Jerusalem’s YMCA was the latest setting for the trendsetter TEDx event, its blazing red four-letter sign taking left stage as the auditorium filled with hundreds of students, well- attired business people and investors to hear presenters share bold ideas.
Dr. Liraz Lasry, a 36-year old lecturer at Tel Aviv University and one of the presenters, studies trends: those who set the trend and those who follow them. She told the audience that, “Those who set the trend have a higher need for uniqueness and lower need for belonging; where the opposite holds true for followers.”
Instagram, which made it simple to take and share photographs, began as an iPhone app and had soon attracted more than 80-million users. Liraz told The Media Line, “They had no advertising and no campaign. They had a simple product and some kind of identity factor.”
Atypical of the image one conjures up of an ordained rabbi, Shoshana Boyd-Gelfand, now based in the UK directing JHUB, an incubator for Jewish organizations, points to a diagram projected on the black backdrop of the stage with the words “inhale” on one side and “exhale” on the other.
“You don’t want to go for the middle ground, that’s death. The secret is not choosing inhale or exhale, but going back and forth between the two,” she explained to The Media Line.
Rabbi Boyd-Gelfand’s “polarity management” theory requires people to embrace two sides of a problem and not choose between one or the other. “As soon as we choose one side we tend to fall into the negative side of what we have chosen,” she said.
Those who attended the conference included Jews, Arabs, Muslims and Europeans. Dan Farberoff, an artist and film maker from the UK, attended TEDx in Jaffa a few months ago and returned to Israel in order to partake in the Jerusalem conference.
Having been involved in co-existence work between Israelis and Palestinians, Farberoff said, “I believe in the ethos of TEDx and the way it brings people together with different ideas, and I also like the fact that it is happening in Jerusalem, a city which is a meeting place for many ideas, cultures and beliefs.”
“TED,” which stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design, is a non-profit organization started by Chris Anderson that first made its mark – to showcase ideas worth spreading—in the 1980’s according to Michalya Schonwald Moss, the convener of TEDx Jerusalem. The program evolved into creating local community-organized events, some in places as remote as Glaciers, Alaska.
Schonwald Moss and her husband honeymooned at TED India, a TED Global event. Subsequently, she was approached by the ROI Community which asked her to take out a license for TEDx Jerusalem – which she did over a year ago.
One of the organizers, Beto Maya, had a dream of bringingTEDx to Jerusalem, “to make a difference in the city by being able to take out our differences and actually deal with things that are important—that is, people and their ideas.”
Politics was set aside for the day, the emphasis instead being more on motivational, technological and cultural concepts.
The youngest presenter in Jerusalem was Or Sagy, who is only 17-years old and currently a student at Tel Aviv University. Sagy makes duplication technology faster. He explained to The Media Line that as a result of his research at the Weitzman Institute, “the duplication of CD’s in the millions can be done in 10 days as opposed to three months.”
From as far away as India came Masarat Daud, a journalist who worked in the UAE, who presented her Eight Day Academy Program, explaining how she empowered villagers in rural areas in Rajasthan. “We have people who have never gone to schools, people who have worked in fields, but they come there and they share ideas and it is fascinating to see something like that.”
Daud is also the curator of TEDx Shekhavati, the largest TEDx event globally.
Jerusalemite Amir Amedi blew the audience away by taking just three minutes to train them to read a word through sounds as he demonstrated his current research with the blind. A professor of Medical Neuro Biology and Cognitive Neuro Science at Hebrew University, Amedi told The Media Line that blind people are not blind because of the brain. The problem is in their eyes or their pathways; and the brain works pretty well.
“We use software like i-music, giving color information or shape information. With sounds we try to teach [the sightless]a new language. In 70 hours, a blind person can read an exit sign or walk into a room and zoom onto a person and know if he’s smiling, angry or surprised,” he explained.
There were more than 1,000 applications to participate in TEDx Jerusalem, but only 500 could be accommodated. The organizers chose attendees based on a balance of male and female; people from Jerusalem and other cities in Israel; and people from abroad.
Of the sixteen presenters, two were Arab. Haneen Magadlh, a trained social worker, is director of the Attaa Center, a human rights organization which aims to empower the Arab sector. Fuad Abu Hamed is a lecturer at Hebrew University and chairman of the Al-Quds Dialogue Center for Community and Cultural Development, whose purpose is to improve the quality of life of residents of Jerusalem.
The price tag for the event was not disclosed, but according to Schonwald Moss attendees paid less than fifty US dollars each; with subsidies provided by the Schusterman and Leichtag Foundations, New Spirit and ROI Community defraying the costs.
For those who could not attend, “there is even ‘TEDx in a box’ where you can create a home event with your friends,” Moss said.
Jay Shultz, who heads the Am Yisrael Foundation, told The Media Line that he was one of the lucky ones to attend. “It’s exciting for me, living here in Israel, to have access to that kind of world platform in a place I love so dearly.”