Praying With My Legs: The Radically Amazing Life & Times of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

Steve Brand is an Emmy Award-winning film, television and new media producer, having produced newsmagazine segments and long-form work for most of the major commercial television networks, as well as for PBS and cable outlets. His independent work has been shown theatrically and non-theatrically throughout the United States and abroad, and is available on home video. His corporate and web video clients include FedEx, News Corporation and SportsIllustrated.com. Among those with whom he has worked are David Brancaccio, Maria Hinojosa, Bob Abernethy, Diane Sawyer, John Stossel, Hugh Downs, Sheppard Smith, Chris Wallace, Linda Ellerbee, Jami Floyd, Bill Ritter, Chris Cuomo, Dr. Timothy Johnson, JuJu Chang, Deborah Roberts, Jay Schadler, Lynn Sherr, Chris Connelly, former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop and actor John Lithgow.

Brand received his M.F.A. from the NYU Graduate Film School, where he made About That Time, which won 1st Prize at the Baltimore Film Festival and was the recipient of several other film festival awards. After graduating from NYU, he wrote and directed comedy skits for the internationally syndicated children’s television program, Big Blue Marble. He also co-produced and edited several short films for New York City’s Phoenix and La Mama Theaters, shown in Off-Broadway productions directed by John Lithgow and Wilford Leach.

Brand has worked extensively for ABC News, initially as a film editor for 20/20 and Closeup documentaries, and then as a producer and coordinating producer in the News Magazines division, primarily working for 20/20, where he received Emmy nominations for an investigative report on age discrimination and for a segment on widows and widowers. While there, he also produced Punishing Parents, a one-hour program about parental responsibility in the wake of the Columbine and Jonesboro massacres, which won the Silver Award at the World Media Festival. He also won Cine Golden Eagles for Going Straight, a report on the “Ex-Gay” movement, and for Justice Delayed, the story of a cold case murder solved through DNA evidence. He was also the recipient of an Angel Award for The Conversion, about a 12 year old Jewish boy’s harrowing experience as the target of Southern Baptist proselytism. Brand was appointed Coordinating Producer on Search for Titanic, a co-production between 20/20 and The National Geographic Channel.

While at ABC’s Primetime Live, Brand produced Whose Child?, a story about foster care featuring Diane Sawyer, and co-produced (with Greg Fisher) Hope Sells, an Emmy-nominated investigative report on bogus alternative cancer treatments.

At CBS News’s Street Stories with Ed Bradley, he produced stories on asset forfeiture, child demonstrators in the anti-abortion movement, and a “Freedom Summer”-style voter registration drive in the Deep South.

As a producer and occasional videographer for NOW on PBS Brand has produced segments on the Bush Administration’s domestic spying program, the minimum wage as an election year issue, and the plight of Southern California long-distance commuters crushed between spiking gas prices and the mortgage meltdown. The latter segment was the launch program of a Rockefeller Foundation initiative on infrastructure.

In long-form television, Brand and co-producer Gretchen Berland received Emmys for outstanding achievement in news and documentary programming for A Time for Change, the concluding hour of a five-hour series on healthcare made by MacNeil/Lehrer Productions, which aired both on NBC and PBS. Also for PBS, Brand produced A Search for Solid Ground; The Intifada through Israeli Eyes, a one hour documentary executive-produced by Peter Kunhardt and Richard Plepler.

In 1984, through his company Ways & Means Productions, Brand completed Kaddish, an independent feature documentary about growing up as the child of a Jewish Holocaust survivor. Kaddish was one of two American films selected for that year’s NEW DIRECTORS/NEW FILMS series, presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art. Supported in large part by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the film went on to widespread theatrical and educational distribution (it had its theatrical premiere at the Surf Theater in San Francisco following its screening at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival) and was listed by David Edelstein as one of the 10 Best Films of 1985. The film was broadcast by WNET/13 and BRAVO and received a Special Jury Prize in Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival. It has been screened at international film festivals from Moscow to Berlin, Paris, London, Jerusalem, Nyon and Verona. Kaddish was recently restored to 4K by IndieCollect with the aid of grants from the Sundance Institute and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture. The restoration had its World Premiere at the 2022 New York Jewish Film Festival.

In 1988, Brand was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to develop a treatment for a dramatic film about turn-of-the-century Vienna, based on Frederic Morton’s book, A Nervous Splendor. He is also the author of an original screenplay, Al & Aggie, and co-author with Robert Mottley of a screenplay adaptation of Chaim Potok’s My Name is Asher Lev.

Prior to his producing work, Brand was a film editor whose work includes three Emmy-Award winning segments for 20/20 on the fall of Saigon; on the murder of Viola Liuzzo, a civil rights activist killed in Alabama after participating in the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march; and on a return to Cambodia’s killing fields. Among his other film experiences, Brand served as an on-air correspondent for the PBS coverage of the World Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors in Jerusalem.

Brand is currently working on Praying With My Legs, an independent feature documentary about the life, thought and enduring impact of human rights activist and religious thinker Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. Excerpts from that documentary have appeared in short films Brand has produced about Heschel for PBS’s Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly (which garnered him a second Angel Award for Excellence in Media) as well as for the Musee d’art et d’histoire du Judaisme in Paris.