Roberta Hodes, filmmaker for the nascent IDF — 1927–2021.
Excerpts from her obituary:
Upon graduation from Vassar College, Roberta set sail for the newly formed State of Israel. From volunteering on Kibbutz Ein HaShofet, she was recruited by the Haganah, where she helped make IDF informational films — which led her into a long and exciting career in the film industry upon her return to the U.S. She even appeared in Out of Evil, a 1951 Hebrew Israeli film (available on YouTube) about the transition from the Holocaust to the establishment of Israel.
In 1954, Roberta was perhaps the first to receive film credit as “script supervisor,” serving in that role for director Elia Kazan’s masterpiece On the Waterfront, starring Marlon Brando, and subsequent Kazan films including Baby Doll and A Face in the Crowd.
Her short film The Game, about disadvantaged African American and Puerto Rican youth on New York’s Lower East Side, won an award for best documentary at the Venice Film Festival. She also directed A Secret Space, a coming-of-age story about a young boy’s bar mitzvah, for PBS. In addition, Roberta taught graduate film at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts for fifteen years.
See her obituary for more about her rich life.