This December marks the 30th anniversary of the release of Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg’s Academy Award™-winning film that brought Holocaust remembrance to the forefront of popular culture. To commemorate the anniversary, the USC Shoah Foundation and the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City are hosting a special panel discussion on November 5 to examine the impact and legacy of the film and its influence on the evolution of Holocaust history and memory.

The USC Shoah Foundation and The Latin American Network for Education on the Shoah (Red LAES) today launched a new IWitness web page that offers downloadable Spanish-language educational activities based on testimonies from the 56,000-strong Visual History Archive.

Ever wonder what date USC Shoah Foundation held its first teacher-training workshop, or who was the first recipient of the Ambassadors for Humanity award? Have you ever wanted to know all of the Institute’s major accomplishments in a given year since its founding in 1994?

If you’ve ever watched genocide survivor testimony from the Visual History Archive and it spurred you to wonder what you can do to help prevent acts of intolerance and inhumanity, USC Shoah Foundation has an opportunity for you this holiday season.

Educators looking for strategies and best practices for teaching using testimonies from the Visual History Archive can refer to a new guide published on the IWitness website.

The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research invites applications from senior scholars for its 2016-2017 Center Research Fellowship. The fellowship provides $30,000 support and will be awarded to an outstanding senior scholar from any discipline who will advance genocide research through the use of the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive and other USC resources.

USC Shoah Foundation executive staff, supporters and partners met in China this week for the 2015 USC Global Conference, where they shared the Institute’s mission and newest projects with an international audience.

During the weekend of October 10-11, the University of Southern California gathered international academics, musicians and members of the Los Angeles community for a symposium and series of events, collectively called Singing in the Lion’s Mouth: Music as Resistance to Genocide. Hosted by Professor Wolf Gruner of the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, and Professor Nick Strimple of the USC Thornton School of Music, the symposium, film screening and concert were also sponsored by USC’s Vision and Voices arts and humanities initiative. The following paragraphs are a reflection on the individual events that made up the weekend, and an exploration into the larger ideas raised in discussions over the course of the weekend.

Members of the USC Shoah Foundation Board of Councilors got creative during the annual board meeting in New York, Oct. 14-15.

About a year after I joined USC Shoah Foundation, I was invited to be the keynote speaker at the Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre’s Holocaust Education Week in Toronto. The theme that year was about memory and they had graciously invited me, the new Director of Education, to discuss memory in the context of the Institute’s education platform IWitness and testimony-based education.

The National Science Foundation awarded the Shoah Foundation a grant of $7.5 million distributed over five years, to develop speech-recognition software for cataloging more than 116,000 hours of videotaped testimonies of Holocaust survivors and eyewitnesses, whose multilingual aspect poses special research challenges. As cataloging the testimonies is time-consuming and costly, particularly when it involves interviews in other languages, the NSF grant will support the development of a computer system that should be able to review the tapes and recognize important words and phrases.

Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation has added Hungary to the list of countries in which eyewitness testimonies have been recorded for its Archive. The Foundation, established in 1994 by Steven Spielberg after filming Schindler's List, is videotaping the testimonies of Holocaust survivors and other witnesses around the world.

Last night, Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation commemorated the recording of its 50,000th testimony with survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust. At a ceremony attended by over 400 people involved with the project, both at its Los Angeles headquarters and abroad, Shoah Foundation Founder and Chairman Steven Spielberg thanked everyone and announced the future direction of the organization. Spielberg told the group, "no one could have imagined the breadth of the undertaking we embarked on four years ago.

Cornell marked the launch Wed., Nov. 3 with a public lecture by New Yorker columnist and Rwandan Genocide expert Philip Gourevitch.

Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation in association with Maxell Corporation of America/Hitachi Maxell LTD and Burda Media is pleased to announce the release of Survivors: Testimonies of the Holocaust. The interactive CD-ROM, narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio and Winona Ryder, incorporates visual and oral histories recorded by the Shoah Foundation. It is the first educational CD-ROM from Steven Spielberg's nonprofit foundation.

Steven Spielberg, Founder and Chairman of Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, and Foundation Directors James Moll and June Beallor, announced today that Dr. Michael Berenbaum will join Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation in early January 1997 as President and CEO.

In December 1995, USC Shoah Foundation, then called, Survivors of the Shoah Foundation, held a training session for interviewers in Buenos Aires; bringing together people from different countries of Latin America. The Foundation had just started to collect the survivors’ testimonies throughout the world and was about to start recording testimonies in Brazil.

The roundtable discussions and panels helped lay the framework for UNESCO to develop digital educational resources and a teacher’s guide.

I teach at an Islamic school, and I am in awe of how testimony has opened the eyes and hearts of my students and inspired them to fight injustice. This is particularly amazing considering the Shoah is not even part of the curriculum in many Arab countries. When I asked my class why testimony has affected them so deeply, their response was: “Testimony teaches us that the world isn’t about us vs. them. It is about how WE can make the world a better place by not being bystanders.”

The IWitness Watch page has been redesigned in order to enhance user experience for educators.

The man who carried out one of the most extraordinary missions of World War II is the subject of a new documentary that will screen at select theaters in Los Angeles and New York City throughout November.

Special education teacher Tony Cole introduced teachers to IWitness at an orientation for University College London (UCL)’s Beacon School in Holocaust Education program on Oct. 27.

Paris. The way we think of that beautiful city has changed. That's what they want. They want us to think about things differently, to use Paris as a symbol of bloodshed and fear, not the one we know and love of liberty and culture. That is the nature of extremism: It tries to change who we are, how we see the world, to change our habits and our patterns of thought, to enjoy our freedoms less, to exert control.

Finding Your Seat on the Bus, the IWitness activity piloted by students as part of the IWitness Detroit program, is now published on IWitness.

Shandler’s talk will focus on Yiddish performances of Holocaust survivors in the Visual History Archive of USC Shoah Foundation.

Survivors and witnesses of the 2015 synagogue attack in Copenhagen were interviewed for a new collection on contemporary anti-Semitism.

USC Shoah Foundation and the Center for Initiatives in Jewish Education (CIJE) came together on Monday to introduce the IWitness-CIJE partnership in New York.

Director of Research and Documentation Karen Jungblut hosted a visit from several Nanjing Massacre scholars this week to introduce the work of the Institute and discuss future partnerships.

Like many of you, I sat in front of my television on the evening of Friday, November 13, 2015 and watched in horror as news of the terrorist attacks in Paris flooded the airways. "Not again," I thought to myself. My heart ached for people whom I had never met and for a city and country thousands of miles away.

USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research welcomed the University of Munich’s Maximilian Strnad to USC last week.