Award-winning filmmaker and Penn State assistant professor Boaz Dvir tells the stories of ordinary people who, under extraordinary circumstances, transform into trailblazers and game changers. For instance, his PBS film, A Wing and a Prayer, recounts a World War II flight engineer's transformation into the leader of a secret operation to save newborn Israel. Dvir grew up in Kfar Galim, a village in Israel, and moved to New Jersey when his father worked for the U.N. The family later moved to Florida and Dvir attended the University of Florida, where he earned a bachelor's degree in journalism and an MFA in creative photography. He also earned a master's from the UF Documentary Institute. He would serve as an officer and military journalist for the Israel Defense Force during The Gulf War in 1991, providing material to foreign correspondents, James Baker's office and then Israeli spokesman and current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Dvir's grandfather, a holocaust survivor, had fought in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, and his experiences would have an influence on Dvir's work. “It really started as an interview with my grandfather. At that time I wasn’t even making documentaries." He has written for many publications, including Newsday, The South Florida Sun-Sentinel, The Tampa Bay Times,the Philadelphia Inquirer, The Miami Herald, the Las Vegas Sun, The Satirist, Scripps Howard's Treasure Coast Newspapers, the Times of Israel, Explore Magazine and The Jerusalem Post. Dvir served as editor of the Jacksonville Business Journal and managing editor of the South Florida Business Journal, which are part of Newhouse's American City Business Journals. For several years, he appeared on “Week in Review” and wrote commentaries for WJCT, Jacksonville's NPR/PBS station. Dvir has won six Florida Magazine Association awards, including first place for his communigator column. He also won numerous awards from the Florida Press Association, including first place for his Business Journal column. Dvir's films have won several prestigious awards. For instance, A Wing and a Prayer won Best Documentary in the 2016 Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival. He lectured at the University of Florida for ten years, and while there, directed and produced a DVD of documentary shorts to Professor Nancy Dana's inquiry book Digging Deeper into Action Research. He is currently an assistant professor at Penn State University. Dvir, who is writing a book for Rowman & Littlefield about this 1948 operation, is in post-production on Cojot, a feature documentary that tells the story of a French banker who set out to kill former Nazi officer Klaus Barbie and ended up playing a pivotal role in Israel's 1976 Operation Entebbe; and Discovering Gloria, about an inner-city schoolteacher who becomes a highly effective innovator and national model. Dvir's critically acclaimed films also include Jessie's Dad, which captures an uneducated truck driver's transformation into a national child-protection activist. Dvir teamed up with Retro Report to produce a short documentary, “How Special Ops Became Central to the War On Terror,” for The New York Times. Lifetime and Investigation Discovery have incorporated footage from Dvir's documentaries into their programs. His films have received coverage by such media as the Huffington Post, Haaretz, MSNBC, the New York Post, The Miami Herald, Stars and Stripes, the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and Florida magazine. Dvir created a documentary short about PALS, which helped the nonprofit that aids troubled teens receive an official nomination for a Nobel Peace Prize and raise hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants. Dvir received a Lilly Endowment grant from the Religion News Service to research spiritual aspects of the Holocaust.
