Black and Jewish America: An Interwoven History

 Phil Bertelsen is an Emmy and Peabody award-winning producer and director who uses film and television to entertain, inspire, and provoke audiences. Through his storytelling, Bertelsen explores topics absent from our history books and demonstrates how integral Black history is in the whole story of America. Most recently, Phil’s HBO limited documentary series Seen And Heard was nominated for an 2025 Independent Spirit Award. His prior feature documentary The Picture Taker was nominated for a Peabody Award. His History Channel documentary 761st Tank Battalion—The Original Black Panthers with Morgan Freeman is now streaming on Hulu alongside his episode of the Emmy winning documentary series, The 1619 Project. His previous work, Who Killed Malcolm X, is a six-part series currently on Netflix that explores the death and controversial convictions associated with the slain civil rights leader. That series prompted a reinvestigation of the decades-old crime resulting in the exoneration of two wrongly convicted men.

Sara Wolitzky is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker dedicated to creating engaging, socially relevant documentary programs. Most recently, she served as a director and co-executive producer of a forthcoming multi-part series with noted scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Black and Jewish America; An Interwoven History (PBS, 2026). She previously served as supervising producer on Dr. Gates’s Webby Award-winning series Black History in Two Minutes (or So) and on Ms.: A Revolution in Print (HBO, 2025). Earlier in her career, she helped launch the multi-platform documentary series Makers, which chronicled the U.S. and global women’s movement and profiled hundreds of prominent trailblazers. She was a co-producer of the original three-hour documentary Makers: Women Who Make America (PBS, 2013) and produced the Emmy-nominated Makers: Women in Space (PBS, 2014) and the feature-length Makers: Once and For All (Amazon/AOL, 2015). She later directed Not Done: Women Remaking America (PBS, 2020), which received a News & Documentary Emmy nomination.

Julia Marchesi is a nonfiction producer, director, showrunner, and podcast host based in New York. She directed the feature HBO documentary Frederick Douglass: In Five Speeches (2022), which was nominated for an Emmy Award and the Humanitas Prize. She was the series producer and director on Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s PBS series Reconstruction: America After the Civil War (2019), which won a DuPont-Columbia Award. She co-directed the PBS American Masters film Mae West: Dirty Blonde (2020), which was the runner-up for the Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Prize for Film. In 2017, she was nominated for a Grammy Award in the Best Music Film category for Soundbreaking, a PBS series about the history of music recording. She was the showrunner on two CNN series: Soundtracks (2017) and The 2010’s (2023). Most recently, she was the series producer and director on Gates’s PBS series Great Migrations (2025) and the writer and producer of The Trial of Alec Baldwin, directed by Rory Kennedy, which appeared at DOC NYC in 2025. She was recently awarded a production grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for a film about women war reporters in Vietnam.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. An Emmy, Du Pont, and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, and institution builder, he has published numerous books and produced and hosted an array of documentary films about Black History, including, most recently, Black and Jewish America: An Interwoven History (PBS, 2025). Gates’s groundbreaking genealogy and genetics series, Finding Your Roots, which received a Primetime Emmy nomination, is now in its twelfth season on PBS. His latest book, The Black Box: Writing the Race (Penguin Random House, 2024), was named one of the New York Times 100 Best Books of the Year. Most recently, he was awarded the prestigious Spingarn Medal from the NAACP and was elected an Honorary Fellow by the Royal Academy of Arts in England.