With “Rosenwald,” documentarian Aviva Kempner adds another pearl to her growing string of films celebrating Jewish-American achievement.
Like the filmmaker’s 1998 “The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg,” which looked at the great professional baseball player, and “Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg,” her 2009 profile of radio and television pioneer Gertrude Berg,” “Rosenwald” is a thorough and engaging, if somewhat formally conventional, profile of a prominent public citizen: Julius Rosenwald (1862-1932).
Unlike those earlier films, the subject of Kempner’s latest work is less remarkable for his personal accomplishments — the son of German immigrants, Rosenwald rose to become the head of Sears, Roebuck and Co., amassing a great fortune — than for what he did with that money on behalf of others. In the early years of the 20th century, Rosenwald donated millions to the construction of more than 5,300 schools in black communities in the rural South.
A parade of alumni of these institutions, known as Rosenwald Schools, joins a chorus of historians and Rosenwald relatives to sing the Chicago philanthropist’s praises and to establish context. These interviews are supplemented by what appear to be staged re-enactments, featuring costumed actors, in scenes depicting the segregation and racism of the pre-civil rights-era South.
It’s an effective technique, and it helps to alleviate some of the uniformity of the film’s talking heads. And while a good chunk of the film’s first third is devoted to a history of Sears, which is actually quite fascinating, it takes a while for “Rosenwald” to get to the meat of its story.
The film is framed as the answer to a question: What made him do this for these kids? The answer that seems to come closest to the truth is put forth later, by one of the film’s interview subjects: As a member of a “despised minority,” we’re told, Rosenwald closely identified with the struggles of African-Americans.
