Aviva Kempner | |
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Born | December 23, 1946 Berlin, Germany |
Alma mater | University of Michigan |
Aviva Kempner (born December 23, 1946) is an 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.
Kempner was born in Berlin, Germany, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor and a U.S. Army officer. She founded the Washington Jewish Film Festival in 1989. In 1981, Kempner founded The Ciesla Foundation to promote educational materials relating to the Holocaust and Jewish resistance. In 1986, Kempner wrote and produced Partisans of Vilna, a documentary on Jewish resistance against the Nazis. Additionally, she was the executive producer of the 1989 Grammy Award-nominated record Partisans of Vilna: The Songs of World War II Jewish Resistance. She is the scriptwriter, director and producer of The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg, a film about a Jewish person who fought anti-Semitism during the 1930s and 1940s.
In 2009 she produced Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg, a 90-minute documentary about Gertrude Berg (a popular American radio and television personalities). Berg was the creator, principal writer, and star of the popular 1930s radio show and then the 1950s weekly televised situation comedy, The Goldbergs.
Her most recent film is Rosenwald, a documentary describing how businessman and philanthropist Julius Rosenwald joined with African-American communities in the South to build schools for them during the early 20th century. Rosenwald was released in August 2015.