The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research invites proposals for its 2019- 2020 Interdisciplinary Research Week that will provide support for an interdisciplinary group of international scholars to develop and discuss a collaborative innovative research project in the field of Holocaust and Genocide Studies using the video testimonies of the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive (VHA) and other related resources at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

We are saddened at the recent death of Emmanuel Ndashimye, a survivor of the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi, whose testimony is in the Institute’s Visual History Archive.

A pioneering moment for Holocaust education, the world’s first virtual reality film to take audiences through a concentration camp, launches as immersive experience at four museums in New York, California, Illinois and Florida for limited-engagement exhibit.

Charlotte is among 20 student leaders from 14 university campuses from around the country who are convening at USC Shoah Foundation on Friday for the second-annual Intercollegiate Diversity Congress.

A consortium of more than 40 Hungarian academic institutions and public libraries signs on, bringing the total number of worldwide subscribers to 138.

The integration of the new collection means the Archive now represents nine genocidal events. USC Shoah Foundation last month added 11 Rohingya video interviews—as well as 77 testimonies from other collections—to its ever-expanding Archive.

An ITS group has worked since April of 2017 to expand the discoverability of testimonies for students, researchers and anyone else searching for information about specific genocide events.

Bawnik survived a Jewish ghetto and four concentration camps, only to nearly die on one of the last days of the war, when British warplanes bombed a German ocean liner that he and thousands of other Jewish prisoners had been forced to board.

Starting today, "The Girl and The Picture," USC Shoah Foundation’s documentary about the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, is being shown for one week at the Laemmle Monica Film Center in Santa Monica.

My father was born and raised in Sighet, Romania, just down the road from the Elie Wiesel's simple blue childhood home. When the Nobel laureate's house was spray-painted with antisemitic slurs this summer, it felt like an attack on my own familial history.

Racism. Holocaust denial. BDS. Students at USC Shoah Foundation’s second-annual Intercollegiate Diversity Congress Summit delved into some of the touchiest campus topics, and discussed ways to effect positive change.

  Call for Papers: International Conference "Comparative Lenses: Video Testimonies of Survivors and Eyewitnesses on Genocide and Mass Violence" June 6-7, 2019 Organized by the George and Irina Schaeffer Center for the Study of Genocide, Human Rights and Conflict Prevention, Yahad-In Unum, the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, and the AGBU Nubar Library The Conference

USC Shoah Foundation’s Inna Gogina and Svetlana Ushakova authored segments of the IDNA, the first ever comprehensive source of information about national archives around the world.

A film by USC Shoah Foundation featuring video testimonies on current antisemitism opened a high-level panel Wednesday organized by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) titled, “The Power of Education for Countering Racism and Discrimination: The Case of Anti-Semitism,” at the 73rd Session of the United Nations General Assembly. 

Southern California students in the seventh grade and above are welcome to apply to the highly competitive internship program, which provides a dynamic learning opportunity for young people who will engage with testimonies from survivors and witnesses of genocide.

Kimberly Cheng’s lecture, “American Dreams: Jewish Refugees and Chinese Locals in Post-World War II Shanghai,” examined the collision of cultures in Shanghai, which was significantly influenced first by the persecution of Chinese by Japanese invaders throughout the country, then by the influx of Jewish refugees, and after the war ended, by the arrival and presence of U.S. troops.

Although the current situation in Hungary is more complex than many outsiders understand, it’s a tense situation, Ildikó Barna said, and a good time for students to pay more attention to where the slippery slope of hatred can lead – and where it has indeed taken their own country.

Ignited by students’ enthusiasm over IWitness's recent “100 Days to Inspire Respect” initiative, a campaign called #180DaysToInspireRespect has students at Robert Adams Middle School in Massachusetts volunteering each day to present about the respectful acts they’ve witnessed, received, read and heard about.

The additions will enable the people of Rwanda, who are still dealing with the aftermath of the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsis that left as many as 1 million people murdered over the course of 100 days, to connect with people from the past who shared similar experiences.

Curious but friendly onlookers in the multicultural middle-class neighborhood in Amsterdam joined us. A café owner slowly crossed the street. “What’s happening?” she asked. “We are placing memorial stones in front of my grandparents’ home where they last lived before being deported in 1942,” I replied. “Please join us!”

Education and Outreach Specialist Sedda Antekelian and Program Officer Manuk Avedikyan shared information about the educational use of testimony in the Institute’s Visual History Archive and on the Institute’s educational website, IWitness.

The app by USC Shoah Foundation guides visitors as they move through the plaza, providing explanations about each interpretive element, as well as personal stories by survivors, maps, photos and other multimedia.

"The Girl and The Picture," a film by USC Shoah Foundation that centers on a survivor of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre in China, has been nominated for a 2018 International Documentary Association Award, which is considered among the world’s most important recognitions of the documentary genre.

Called “Cake For Winter,” the sketch by Amanda Andrei stems from a little-known fact that was also unknown to her: During World War II, thousands of Americans and Europeans were interned at Japanese-run concentration camps in the Philippines. It was selected to be performed by actors at the Midwest Dramatists Conference in Kansas.

The Stronger Than Hate initiative will publish stories on a regular basis that will each highlight a separate learning activity in IWitness, tackling some of today’s toughest subjects for students in middle school, high school and universities.

In this activity, students examine stories that have the power to strengthen our human connection or create deep divides leading to hate, intolerance and violence.

Our hearts ache and our minds reel. Innocent lives have been lost at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh where a celebration of life was taking place. Now is a time to mourn those who have been wrenched away from their families at a time that should have been filled with joy. It’s a time to grieve for their families and friends who will forever struggle to understand what happened.

BY STEPHEN SMITH. Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, a survivor of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi death camp in Poland, is the first person I have spoken to since the mass shooting which left eleven dead at the Tree of Life synagogue. She does not waste time greeting me in the doorway of her home in London. “So what are we going to do Stephen? We are not making progress!”

The history of antisemitism is strewn with the corpses of Jews who could not get out of the way when words turned to violence. The slaying of innocent Jewish lives by Pittsburgh gunman Robert Bowers, who this weekend turned his rhetoric about killing Jews into the actual killing of Jewish people, is the latest example. We need laws to allow intervention much earlier, or this will not be the last time we see Jewish people die in America because they are Jews.

Kimberly Cheng (PhD candidate in Hebrew & Judaic Studies and History, New York University) 2018-2019 Breslauer, Rutman & Anderson Research Fellow “American Dreams: Jewish Refugees and Chinese Locals in Post-World War II Shanghai” September 27, 2018