Teachers throughout the San Diego Unified School District had the opportunity to attend an IWitness training led by USC Shoah Foundation staff on Monday.

For the third consecutive year, a new group of teachers gathered in Hungary for the Teaching with Testimony in the 21st Century professional development program to learn how to create their own testimony-based lessons and classroom activities.

This September a new school year will begin in Ukraine and the first lesson students be taught is “Ukraine is united" and the lesson will be devoted to state integrity of Ukraine. A tough issue for the country engrossed into an ongoing military conflict and terrorist attacks.

Educators can now access three of USC Shoah Foundation’s Ukrainian-language lesson guides and modules for free on the USC Shoah Foundation website. Each lesson includes everything teachers need including testimony and film clips.

From the spring 2014 issue of PastForward: French film director and documentarian Claude Lanzmann visited USC Shoah Foundation for the first time this December, bringing with him his latest film and a simple request for the future.

The fast pace of globalization with all of its benefits is also accelerating the viral spread of hatred. Where once regional enmities brewed for centuries with sporadic outbursts of warfare and imperial powers that waxed and waned, the truly global speed and scale of ideological hatred and international conflict was not possible until recently for many practical reasons.

The testimonies of Holocaust survivors were recorded for the Visual History Archive 50 years after the Holocaust took place, but testimonies of more recent genocides are increasingly being collected. The Dynamics of Oral History of War and Genocide panel will examine the challenges, implications and responsibilities that modern testimony collections have for communities that have experienced war and genocide.

After a successful test run, the educational website IWitness is coming out of beta with new functionality, additional languages, as well as a faster and easier way for educators to create accounts so they can begin using IWitness in their classrooms without delay.

After several postponements due to the political turmoil in their country, the 2012 Teaching with Testimony in the 21st Century Ukrainian cohort finally came together this month for a follow-up session about the lessons they created over the last two years.

In the Spring 2014 issue of PastForward, Professor Peter Kreko says education is necessary to combat Hungary’s troubling rise in antisemitism.