Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of MaximumFun.org and is distributed by NPR.

It's Bullseye.

My guess this week is Aviva Kempner. She's the director of the documentary The Spy Behind Home

Play. The film follows the life of Mo Berg. Mo played back in the 1920s and 1930s, the

era of Bebrewth and New Garic. And even though he's not a household name these days like

those guys are, he's maybe a million times more interesting. He was known at the time as

the brainiest man in baseball. He studied Sanskrit at the Sorbonne in Paris. And once he left

baseball, he became a spy during World War II. Here's a scene from the documentary Robert

Fitz, the author of Banzai Bebrewth, shares the time Mo and Bebrewth went on a barnstorming

trip through Japan.

Mo Berg spent most of his time on deck and a deck chair studying Japanese. At the very beginning

of the trip, Bebrewth goes up to Mo Berg and says, do you speak Japanese? Mo Berg says,

no, don't really speak Japanese at all. And they arrive two weeks later in Yokohama.

And the Japanese man comes on board and Berg greets him in what sounds to Bebrewth

like perfect Japanese. And the Bebrewth said, I thought you said, you can't speak Japanese.

And Berg said, well, that was two weeks ago.

Aviva, welcome to Bullseye. It's nice to have you on the show. And thank you for the film.

It's pleasure to be here.

So you have kind of dedicated your career to telling the stories and film of Jewish heroes.

Why is that?

Underknown Jewish heroes. Well, it started out because it's a child of a Holocaust survivor.

I was always fascinated with the fact that people didn't know that Jews had fought back

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