Filmmaker and Penn State associate professor Boaz Dvir tells the stories of ordinary people who, under extraordinary circumstances, transform into trailblazers and game changers.

For instance, his PBS film, A Wing and a Prayer, recounts a World War II flight engineer's transformation into the leader of a secret operation to save newborn Israel.

[7] He lectured at the University of Florida for 10 years, and while there, directed and produced a DVD of documentary shorts to Professor Nancy Dana's inquiry book Digging Deeper into Action Research.

[10] Dvir is in post-production on Cojot, a feature documentary that tells the story of a French banker who set out to kill former Nazi officer Klaus Barbie and ended up playing a pivotal role in Israel's 1976 Operation Entebbe.

Dvir created a documentary short about PALS, which helped the nonprofit that aids troubled teens receive an official nomination for a Nobel Peace Prize and raise hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants.

It is about how people discover their identity—which is usually in times of crisis—and how they can act to preserve that identity to create anew.” Other reviewers include Thomas Van Hare (Historic Wings), Ralph Lowenstein (University of Florida College of Journalism), Miriam Elman (Syracuse University), Barbara Dury (former “60 Minutes” producer), and Richard Shyrock (Virginia Tech) Additionally, in September 2020, Saving Israel was named number 5 on the Oklahoma nonfiction bestsellers list.

[18] Dvir has launched and is director of Penn State's Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Education Initiative and the Hammel Family Human Rights Initiative, which aim to give K-12 students the opportunities to develop critical thinking, fact-finding, active-listening and civic discourse skills, as well as empathy, by assisting educators in the effective instruction of a wide variety of difficult topics.

Some of the scholars who independently reviewed the papers described the Initiative’s research-based nonpartisan approach, which combines practitioner inquiry with trauma-informed and asset-based practices, as novel, innovative and widely needed.

[22] As part of the initiatives, Dvir led a discussion in the Schreyer Honors College’s “Dialogues of Democracy,” titled “Building a Stronger Democratic Future Through Pedagogical Innovation” in February 2024.