The Cold War began its thaw 25 years ago, then apparently melted sufficiently for us to get on with our lives without fear. Surprisingly, the slow thaw is still in progress.

Benjamin Murmelstein was the first person Claude Lanzmann interviewed on his epic journey that led to what eventually became his definitive film, “Shoah.”

Lanzmann sat for a full week with the only living former Alteste Der Judenrat (a term used to describe the head of a ghetto Judenrat) and penetrated deep in to the moral labyrinth of Murmelstein's world.

Executive director Stephen Smith highlights just a few of USC Shoah Foundation's 2013 achievements.

USC Shoah Foundation is excited to announce the upcoming launch of the tablet-compatible version of its award-winning educational website IWitness.

Educators and students can search, watch and engage with the testimonies in IWitness on their iPads or tablet devices after January 6, 2014.   IWitness activities can also be assigned and worked on with a tablet, although video editing will need to be done on a Flash-enabled device (laptop, desktop, etc).   

When I tell my fellow USC students that I’m the president of an organization called SFISA, it’s usually safe to assume that 90% of them have no idea what it is.

It’s not the most elegant of acronyms and we acknowledge this. Our club’s full name – the Shoah Foundation Institute Student Association – is equally as unwieldy but at least it’s descriptive, and that’s something, right?

But even if they’ve heard of our less than stellar name, they still might not know who we are or what we do. So let me take this moment to enlighten you.

On the heels of USC Shoah Foundation’s new partnership with the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall to collect and preserve testimony of Nanjing Massacre survivors, the educational platform Facing History and Ourselves signed an agreement to integrate three of those testimonies into its own educational materials.

Damaged videotapes in the Visual History Archive, previously thought to be unfixable, are being restored thanks to new software developed by USC Shoah Foundation technology staff.

As I write this, I am standing alongside 30 of the last 200 survivors of the Nanjing Massacre, which began 76 years ago Friday.

Sirens sound around this Chinese city as the last few eyewitnesses of a massacre gather. Starting Dec. 13, 1937, and lasting six weeks, as many as 300,000 civilians were murdered during the atrocities.

USC Shoah Foundation and Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall have embarked on a historic effort to preserve the testimonies of the last survivors of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, also known as the Rape of Nanjing.