Aviva Kempner
Directing
Biography
Aviva Kempner (born December 23, 1946) is a German-born American filmmaker. Her documentaries investigate non-stereotypical images of Jews in history and focus on the untold stories of Jewish people. She is most well known for The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg. A child of Holocaust survivor Helen Ciesla, a Polish citizen, and Harold Kempner, a US Army officer, Kempner was born in Berlin, Germany, after World War II. Her family history inspired her to create her first documentary, Partisans of Vilna (1986). She grew up in Detroit and has a brother, Jonathan. Kempner lives in Washington, DC and is an activist for voting rights for the District of Columbia. She was a member of the Class of 1976 at the progressive Antioch School of Law. In 1981, Kempner founded The Ciesla Foundation to produce films that investigate non-stereotypical images of Jews in history and celebrate the untold stories of Jewish heroes. In 1986, Kempner conceived and produced Partisans of Vilna, a documentary on Jewish resistance against the Nazis, Fareynikte Partizaner Organizatsye. She co-founded the Washington Jewish Film Festival in 1989 together with Miriam Mörsel Nathan, and served as the festival's Founding Director. Description above from the Wikipedia article Aviva Kempner, licensed under CC BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Known For
Over the course of two centuries, seven million men, women and children abandoned their homeland for America's shores. In just one horrifying decade, two million left to escape a famine that left another million dead. This is the moving chronicle of the Irish immigrant experience.
Out of Ireland
Promises to Keep follows agitator Snyder and the Community for Creative Non-Violence by showing film-fragments, news-bulletin images from records, and newspaper headlines about the fight to force the government to live up to their promise to provide the homeless of Washington D.C. with proper shelter.
Promises to Keep
Examining the movement that is ending the use of Native American names, logos, and mascots in the world of sports and beyond.
Imagining the Indian: The Fight Against Native American Mascoting
This extraordinary film tells the story of the men and women who formed the Jewish partisan movement in Vilna, Lithuania, during World War II. Using rare archival film footage dating from 1939 to 1944 and contemporary interviews with 40 partisan survivors (including Abba Kovner, a founder of the partisan movement and one of Israel's leading poets) the film explores the difficulties of organizing under the anarchic conditions of the ghetto.
Partisans of Vilna
A new documentary about the life of Nobel Prize winning American author, Saul Bellow. The film combines interviews with Philip Roth, Martin Amis, and others, and presents rare footage of Bellow in Jerusalem and at Mishkenot Sha’ananim.
The Adventures of Saul Bellow
The story of Baseball Hall-of-Famer Hank Greenberg, the first major Jewish baseball star in the Major Leagues, is told through archival film footage and interviews with fans, former teammates, friends, and family. As a great first baseman with the Detroit Tigers, Greenberg endured antisemitism and became a hero and source of inspiration throughout the Jewish community, not incidentally leading the Tigers to Major League dominance in the 1930s.
The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg
The first feature-length documentary about Moe Berg, the enigmatic and brilliant baseball player who turned spy for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II.
The Spy Behind Home Plate
The story of the actor, writer and broadcasting pioneer, Gertrude Berg.
Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg
The Rosenwald Schools by Aviva Kempner is a documentary about how Chicago philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, the son of an immigrant peddler who rose to head Sears, partnered with Booker T. Washington to build 5,400 Southern schools in African American communities in the early 1900s during the Jim Crow era.
Rosenwald
Berlin born Aviva Kempner chronicles her mother Hanka and uncle Dudek Ciesla's lives before and during World War II