This month, the 2017-2019 Interdisciplinary Research Week team came together again for their second weeklong residency at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research.

When it comes to implementing Nazi Germany’s Final Solution, few places were more successful than Nazi-occupied Lithuania. More than 90 percent of the country’s wartime Jewish population of 250,000 was murdered in the Holocaust.

Holocaust Museum Houston this weekend will become the fourth museum in the world to permanently display USC Shoah Foundation’s Dimensions in Testimony, which enables viewers to verbally ask questions to a digital projection of survivors, and hear real-time, lifelike responses. The new exhibit features Houston-area Holocaust survivor William J. “Bill” Morgan, a 93-year-old survivor of the Stanislawow Ghetto in western Ukraine.

Mehmet Polatel, PhD and 2018-2019 Postdoctoral Fellow in Armenian Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, has been awarded the 2019-2020 Center Junior Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. He will arrive at the Center in August and will spend one year in residence. As the inaugural Center Junior Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Dr. Polatel will conduct research in the Visual History Archive and will also teach a course on genocide in the USC Dornsife College of Arts, Letters and Sciences. 

The USC Shoah Foundation hosted winners of the 20th Annual Holocaust Art and Writing Contest on Monday, June 24. Participants were asked to create artistic or written responses to Holocaust survivor testimony from IWitness or The 1939 Society’s archives, in the form of poetry, prose, artwork or short film.

USC Shoah Foundation—The Institute for Visual History and Education (USC Shoah Foundation) announced today the appointment of Lee Liberman as Chair of its Board of Councilors and Joel Citron as Vice Chair effective July 1, 2019. 

USC Shoah Foundation’s William P. Lauder Junior Internship Program kicked off with discussions about the importance of being an upstander in their communities. It continued with a trip to the Japanese American National Museum, where they learned about the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII. And it concluded with student presentations.

USC Shoah Foundation is saddened by the recent loss of Eva Kor, a Holocaust survivor who – along with her twin sister – endured cruel experiments conducted on her at Auschwitz, and, half a century later, sparked controversy by publicly forgiving the Nazis who tormented her and killed her parents and two older sisters. She went on to found CANDLES Museum and Education Center in Indiana.

Today marks the last day of the USC Shoah Foundation’s 100 Voices to Remember Twitter project, a string of daily quotes from a different witness of the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda for each day of its duration. The atrocities claimed as many as one million lives over the course of about 100 days in 1994, when government-backed militias of ethnic Hutus went on a mass killing spree, targeting the country’s next largest ethnic group, the Tutsis.

The Holocaust is not widely taught in Latin America. Few books on the subject are available in Spanish, and university classes that do touch on the history are sometimes outdated.

Any individual testimony of a Holocaust survivor tells a story that is personalized and unique. But a new Jewish Studies class at the University of Toronto is encouraging students to watch USC Shoah Foundation’s testimonies in another way – using applied statistics – to test hypotheses and find broader stories that often aren’t detectible in any single interview. The aim for the course – called Jews: by the numbers – is to take a quantitative approach to studying the humanities.

Miriam Katin survived the Holocaust as a toddler because her quick-thinking mother faked their deaths in Budapest at a historically perilous time for Jews in Hungary. Now 77, Katin has a thriving career as a graphic artist whose humor cartoons have appeared in The New Yorker. Her remarkable oral history would have been lost to time without the initiative by USC Shoah Foundation to document the stories of Holocaust survivors before it is too late.

In the 1980s, a tiny woman in her 50s named Ruth Westheimer shocked and delighted the world with her blunt advice – delivered in a grandmotherly German accent – about sex. She became a media sensation and remains a household name as “Dr. Ruth.” Less known is her perilous journey to get there – a story that includes her survival of the Holocaust and immigration to British-controlled Mandatory Palestine, where she briefly became a sniper in a Jewish paramilitary force.

Professor Taner Akçam, Kaloosdian & Mugar Chair in Armenian Genocide Studies at Clark University, gave a public lecture about Father Krikor Guerguerian’s Archive, a collection of thousands of documents about the Armenian genocide that this scholar and Armenian genocide survivor collected from the 1930s to 1988. Professor Akçam and his graduate students have recently digitized and classified the collection, which is now available to the public.

After months of beta testing with educators around the globe, USC Shoah Foundation is launching the brand new IWalk app, which offers 29 IWalks in seven countries and eight languages.

On March 5, 2019, the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research and the USC Dornsife Institute of Armenian Studies had the pleasure of hosting Dr. Richard Hovannisian, Professor Emeritus of History at University of California, Los Angeles.

On April 25, 2019, the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research celebrated the fifth anniversary of its founding.

Gabor Toth, 2018-2019 Center Postdoctoral Research Fellow, gave a public lecture at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research focusing on his project to find, represent, and reflect on victims’ experiences during the Holocaust. 

Professor Marion Kaplan, 2018-2019 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, gave the annual Shapiro Scholar public lecture on gender and the Holocaust.

Danielle Willard-Kyle, the 2018-2019 Center Graduate Research fellow, gave a public lecture about her month-long research at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research focusing on the testimonies of Jewish survivors who went through Italian Displaced Persons camps after World War II

Bieke Van Camp, the 2018-2019 Robert J.

Anna Lee, a junior at USC from Los Angeles, California majoring in English Literature with minors in Spanish and Teaching English as a Second language (TESOL), has been chosen as the 2019 Beth and Arthur Lev Student Research Fellow at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research.

Ayşenur Korkmaz, a PhD candidate in European Studies at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, has been awarded the 2019-2020 Katz Research Fellowship in Genocide Studies at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research.

Ioanida Costache, a PhD Candidate in Music at Stanford University, has been awarded the 2019-2020 Breslauer, Rutman and Anderson Research Fellowship at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research.

Maël LeNoc, a PhD Candidate in Geography at Texas State University, has been awarded the 2019-2020 Margee and Douglas Greenberg Research Fellowship at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research.

Brigittine M.

 

Their loved ones – including women and children – were slaughtered by the military and tossed into mass graves. For more than 30 years, survivors of the Guatemalan Genocide against the indigenous population assumed nobody cared about their stories. After all, nobody had ever bothered to ask.

Move-in day for students at the University of Southern California this week led to a remarkable small-world moment between two strangers with ties to the Holocaust in the public-exhibit space of USC Shoah Foundation’s lobby. Fifty-eight-year-old Alexander Moissis of the San Francisco Bay Area and his wife were helping their freshman son move into a dormitory when Alexander decided to steal away for a few minutes to visit USC Shoah Foundation, which is located on campus next to the dorm.

Each year, the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research hosts an interdisciplinary team of scholars from different universities and different countries for one week so that they can develop and discuss a collaborative innovative research project in the field of Holocaust and Genocide