Watch the film anytime July 9-13, and then join us online on July 13 for a talk with the filmmaker, Aviva Kempner!
Presented by Aviva Kempner, Filmmaker
The Film: Following her Peabody award-winning The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg, Aviva Kempner once again turns to the fascinating (in this case double) life of a Jewish baseball player: Moe Berg. A rarefied intellectual from Newark, NJ, Berg played as a catcher for five major league teams… and was also a spy for the OSS during WWII as part of the effort to undermine the German atomic bomb program. Rare archival footage and interviews with historians, sportswriters, and espionage experts unravel this stranger-than-fiction story.
The Talk: Join us online for a conversation and Q&A period with the fllmmaker, to learn more about this project, her decades of experience exploring unknown Jewish stories, and her upcoming projects!
Registration to screen the film and join the filmmaker talk is $18. The link to watch the film will be sent to you the week of July 6.
Program fees are never a barrier to enjoying Haberman Institute programs. If fee assistance will help you join us, please reach out to our Executive Director, Matthew Silverman.
Washington, DC based filmmaker Aviva Kempner makes award winning documentaries about underknown Jewish heroes for over 45 years. Kempner completed A Pocketful of Miracles: A Tale of Two Siblings, which chronicles the heroism of the two Ciesla Foundation namesakes, Helen Ciesla Covensky and David Chase—siblings who survived the Holocaust separately and managed to reunite after the war. She co-directed, co-wrote and co-produced Imagining the Indians: The Fight Against Native American Mascoting, a documentary on the movement to remove Native American names, logos, and mascots from the world of sports. Her The Spy Behind Home Plate is about baseball player and OSS spy Moe Berg. Kempner launched the SEW: Sports Equality for Women website which strives to amplify the stories and voices of women in sports.
She made Rosenwald, a documentary about how philanthropist Julius Rosenwald partnered with Booker T. Washington in establishing over 5,000 schools with African Americans in the Jim Crow South. She also made Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg, about Gertrude Berg who created the first television sitcom and Peabody awarded The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg, about the Hall Famer slugger who faced anti-Semitism during the 30s. She also produced the award-winning Partisans of Vilna, about Jews fighting the Nazis
She is presently making a film on screenwriter, journalist and activist Ben Hecht, who exposed the horrors of the Holocaust to the American public and advocated to bring more Jews to US shores and helped bring survivors to a permanent Jewish home in Palestine. Kempner is also making Pissed Off, a documentary short exploring the struggles faced by female lawmakers in Congress who advocated for potty parity in the United States Capitol.
A member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Kempner is a voting rights and statehood advocate for Washington, D.C. and proudly serves on the board of DC Vote.