Aviva Kempner - Life and Career

Life and Career

Kempner was born in Berlin, Germany, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor and a U.S. Army officer. She moved to Michigan with her parents and graduated from the University of Michigan. She now lives in Washington, D.C., where she plays an active role in the artist and film community. She started the Washington Jewish Film Festival in 1989. She attended the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, McDowell and Yaddo artist colonies in 2002–2004. She is also the member of International Film And Television Club of Asian Academy of Film & Television, Noida Film City, India.

In 1981, Kempner founded The Ciesla Foundation to promote educational materials relating to the Holocaust and Jewish resistance to it. Since then, the foundation has expanded its mission to produce and distribute films to educate the public on general social issues of the past and present. Kempner's films are produced under the auspices of Ciesla. In 1986, Kempner conceived 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 the Jewish slugger who fought anti-Semitism in the 1930s and 1940s. It was awarded top honors by the National Society of Film Critics, the National Board of Review, the New York Film Critics Circle, and the Broadcast Film Critics Association. The film received a George Peabody Award and was nominated for an Emmy. An updated DVD of the film containing over two hours of extras came out in 2013.

In 2009, she released Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg, a 90-minute documentary on Gertrude Berg, one of America's favorite 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.

She is currently working on her new film project The Rosenwald Schools, 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. She is also co-writing and producing Casuse, the story of Larry Casuse, a young Native American activist who kidnapped the Mayor of Gallup, New Mexico to draw attention to the plight of the Navajho people and to expose the hypocrisy of the establishment.