In recognition of its pioneering work advancing Holocaust and Genocide Studies since its inception in 2014, the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research has been awarded the honor of hosting the next biennial meeting of the International Network of Genocide Scholars (INoGS). The INoGS 9th International Conference on Genocide will take place in June 2024 at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles and coincide with the Center’s 10-year anniversary celebration.

USC Shoah Foundation today launches its 500th IWitness activity with release of In Lisa's Footsteps, a primary level IWalk based on Mona Golabek’s acclaimed The Children of Willesden Lane books. In Lisa's Footsteps tells the story of Golabek’s mother, Lisa Jura, a young Holocaust survivor who in 1938 escaped from Vienna to London on the Kindertransport.

Inside a Warsaw light stage surrounded by nine cameras, prominent historian and journalist Marian Turski in late June completed the first ever Polish-language Dimensions in Testimony (DiT) interview. Conducted by USC Shoah Foundation and the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw (POLIN), Turski’s interview was a truly international collaboration involving 15 team members from Belgium, Germany, Hungary, Poland, the U.K and the U.S.

USC Shoah Foundation is accepting applications for USC student leaders to take part in the upcoming Stronger Than Hate Student Leadership Summit. Triggered by the deadly white nationalist rally of August 2017 in Charlottesville, VA, USC Shoah Foundation’s Stronger Than Hate initiative draws on the power of eyewitness testimony to help students and the general public recognize and counter antisemitism, racism, xenophobia and other forms of hatred.

USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of our friend Phillip Maisel, who died in Melbourne, Australia on August 22 just days after celebrating his 100th birthday. Born in Vilnus (now Lithuania) in 1922, Maisel lived through forced labor camps in Estonia, Germany and Poland before emigrating to Australia and going on to record more than 1,500 testimonies of his fellow Holocaust survivors. He called each recorded testimony “a miracle” and thereby earned the nickname “the keeper of miracles.” His memoir, published last year, was called The Keeper of Miracles.

USC Shoah Foundation with its partner the Schindler’s Ark Foundation has added a tour of Oskar Schindler’s former factory in what is now the Czech Republic to its mobile IWalk application, enabling smartphone users to explore the site where the German businessman sheltered more than 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust.

The USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research invites research proposals from USC undergraduate students and USC graduate students for the 2023 Beth and Arthur Lev Student Research Fellowship. The fellowship provides $1,500 support for USC undergraduate students or $3,000 support for USC graduate students doing research focused on the testimonies of the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive and/or other related USC resources and collections for one month during the summer of 2023. The fellowship is open to USC undergraduate students and graduate students of all disciplines.

The pages of my copy of The Giver are totally worn. The cover has been folded and there are subsequent pages with the same type of tear. On the bottom right corner is an advertisement for a special low price of $2.99 and in the upper right corner there is the embedded medal of the John Newbery Prize, one of the most prestigious prizes in literature.

USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of Edward Mosberg, a Holocaust survivor whose passion for sharing his story through lectures, recorded interviews, and educational trips back to concentration camps in Europe taught and inspired people everywhere. He was 96.

Eighty-one years ago today Nazi soldiers and their collaborators committed one of the largest single massacres of the Holocaust with the murder of close to 33,000 Jews in the Babyn Yar ravine in Ukraine. The site of the atrocity on the outskirts of the capital Kyiv is now a memorial that people anywhere can visit with a new Virtual IWalk released by USC Shoah Foundation earlier this year. 

USC Shoah Foundation is accepting applications for the highly competitive William P. Lauder Junior Internship Program that begins November 13. Since 2014, the program has provided a dynamic and unique learning opportunity for hundreds of students to engage with testimonies from survivors and witnesses of genocide.  The program is looking for 40 grade 7-11 students nationwide who are representative of diverse backgrounds and academic skills. 

Pardy Minassian’s childhood in Syria was suffused with sounds from Armenia, the result of her father’s collection of more than 500 audio and video interviews he conducted over the years with Armenian Genocide survivors. When Pardy and her family left Syria for Armenia in 2012, the then 18-year-old student focused on a range of different Armenian sounds, earning a bachelor’s degree in Music Composition and a master's degree in Guitar Performance from the Yerevan State Komitas Conservatory. 

Rena Quint has worked hard to find a balance between moving beyond memory and living inside of it, between yearning to know—and have proof of—where she came from and what she lost, but of not wanting to be defined by it.

When Lee Liberman first viewed testimonies from USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive (VHA) almost 25 years ago, she was immediately moved to action. “We have a commitment and duty to humanity to combat hate, and we must work diligently to bring these testimonies to communities around the globe,” she said. More than two decades later, as Lee transitions to an emeritus role after a successful term as Chair of the Institute’s Board of Councilors, she has more than delivered on her pledge.

USC Shoah Foundation today launches a series of professional development webinars that provide educators with testimony-based resources that support accelerated learning practices across the curriculum. The focus on accelerated learning comes as schools return to in-person instruction and teachers navigate the range of learning losses caused by the need for remote schooling during the Covid-19 pandemic.

USC Shoah Foundation has moved into the next chapter of its work, with noted international expert and governmental advisor on Holocaust remembrance and antisemitism Dr. Robert Williams appointed as Andrew J. and Erna Finci Viterbi Executive Director.

East Coast dance artist Rachel Linsky combines movement and testimony to create a novel form of Holocaust education.  Rachel directs and choreographs ZACHOR, an initiative that honors Holocaust survivors through dance. Her latest work in the project is Hidden, a dance film and production based on the story of Aaron Elster, a Jewish boy who from 1943 to 1945 hid from Nazi persecution in the attic of a Polish family. 

Today we remember the lives lost at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh on October 27, 2018. The Shabbat morning attack, in which 11 worshippers were killed and six wounded—including several Holocaust survivors—was the deadliest act of antisemitic violence in United States history. Synagogue member Judah Samet, a Hungarian-born survivor of the Holocaust, sat trapped in his car in the synagogue parking lot that Saturday morning as law enforcement agents engaged in a gun battle with the shooter.

California Governor Gavin Newsom recently declared that Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day—observed annually on April 24—will become a statewide holiday to be known as Genocide Awareness Day.

USC Shoah Foundation invites applications from advanced-level PhD candidates for the 2023-2024 USC Shoah Foundation Robert J. Katz Research Fellowship in Antisemitism Studies.

USC Shoah Foundation today welcomes Dr. Victoria Walden, a senior lecturer from the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, who will spend the next two weeks conducting research at the Institute on digital memory and the Holocaust.

Fifteen hours of interviews describing the actions of a group of World War II-era diplomats who defied official policies to save tens of thousands of lives during the Holocaust have been added to USC Shoah Foundation’s 55,000-strong Visual History Archive (VHA) thanks to a collaboration with the Andrew J. & Joyce D. Mandell Family Foundation.

  Call for Applications from PhD Candidates   Greenberg Research Fellowship USC Shoah Foundation Katz Research Fellowship in Genocide Studies

  Call for Applications from Senior Scholars   2023-2024 Center Research Fellowship Deadline: January 31, 2023  

USC President Carol L. Folt and scholars from USC and beyond gathered at the global headquarters of USC Shoah Foundation on November 11 for the public launch of the redesigned Visual History Archive, the world’s largest collection of primary source video testimonies from survivors of the Holocaust and other genocides. 

Dr. Kori Street, Deputy Executive Director of USC Shoah Foundation, was recently appointed to California Governor Gavin Newsom’s Council on Holocaust and Genocide Education.  Governor Newsom launched the council last year to promote Holocaust and genocide education with the goal of providing young people with the tools necessary to recognize and respond to bigotry or discrimination.  

USC Shoah Foundation offers a robust collection of resources, events and activities to counter antisemitism for educators and students—on the USC campus and beyond—for the 2022-2023 academic year. Initiatives at USC began with the September 16-18 Stronger than Hate Leadership Summit for student leaders. The three-day event, led by USC Shoah Foundation’s Education Department, consisted of guest speakers, discussions and interactions with IWitness and testimonies from the Visual History Archive. 

The Center announces Call for Applications for research fellowships for senior scholars, PhD candidates, and USC students.

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) today announced the appointment of USC Shoah Foundation Finci-Viterbi Executive Director Robert Williams as Advisor to the IHRA for a three-year term.

Today marks the 84th anniversary of the Kindertransport, the rescue operation that beginning in 1938 helped nearly 10,000 Jewish children escape to the United Kingdom from Germany and Nazi-controlled territory in Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland.