What Testimony Teaches Us About Heritage and Identity This Month

In May, Americans commemorate both Jewish American Heritage Month and Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. For families, educators, and communities, the USC Shoah Foundation’s testimony collection offers a powerful resource for commemoration—demonstrating how personal narratives deepen our understanding of identity, history, and belonging.

Our collection preserves more than 60,000 testimonies from individuals across 69 countries and 45 languages. While best known for documenting the Holocaust, the collection extends beyond a single historical moment to include testimonies connected to other genocides, including the Cambodian Genocide and the Rohingya Genocide. These are full-life testimonies that capture the experiences of individuals and families before, during, and after periods of upheaval—tracing migration, cultural continuity, and the process of rebuilding lives in new societies, including the United States.

For many Jewish survivors, arrival in America marked both an end and a beginning: the close of one chapter shaped by loss and the start of another defined by adaptation, opportunity, and the preservation of identity. Their testimonies reflect not only what was endured but also how individuals made sense of their experiences in new cultural contexts. 

These narratives resonate across communities. Testimony illuminates themes central to many heritage observances: the transmission of memory across generations, the negotiation of identity in diverse societies, and how individuals and communities respond to exclusion, discrimination, and change. Engaging with these testimonies offers a deeper understanding of both the specificity of individual experience and the broader patterns that connect them.

In classrooms and public programs, testimony continues to serve as a bridge—linking historical knowledge with contemporary understanding. It provides a human-centered way to explore complex issues, helping learners move beyond the abstraction of history in a textbook to its lived reality by engaging compassionately with real people, their lives, and their choices.

During heritage months and beyond, our collection remains a vital resource for exploring these questions with depth and nuance. It reinforces a central idea: history is not only something we study, it is something we inherit, interpret, and carry forward.