The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research invites proposals for its 2018-2019 International Teaching Fellowship that will provide support for university and college faculty to integrate testimonies from the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive (VHA) into new or existing courses.

USC Shoah Foundation launched the first in a series of educational activities developed in partnership with the Armenian General Benevolent Union (AGBU). The series incorporates testimony of Armenian Genocide survivors and their descendants with supplementary videos from AGBU WebTalks, and is available to students through the Institute’s award-winning educational website, IWitness.

Reflections on the recent conferences the USC Shoah Foundation hosted or participated in, and the ways in which these scholarly gatherings enrich the field of genocide studies and demonstrate the value of the Visual History Archive.

“Digital Approaches to Genocide Studies” was the first international conference bringing the fields of digital humanities and genocide studies together. Organized by the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research and cosponsored by the USC Digital Humanities Program, the conference convened 23 scholars from all over the world — the United States, Germany, Poland, France, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada.

New Dimensions in Testimony has been a work of passion for USC Shoah Foundation since 2010. After years of development at the University of Southern California including with USC Institute for Creative Technologies and with content developer Conscience Display, the program is now reaching audiences in museums around the world.

When Elizabeth Holtzman of New York became the youngest woman in American history elected to Congress at age 31, she hadn’t spent much time thinking about Nazi war criminals. But when a whistleblower in 1973 brought to her attention the fact that such perpetrators were living in the United States with full knowledge of the federal government, she decided to use the power of her office to do something about it.

A love of old movies drew Shiraz Bhathena into the moving image archive field. As an archivist and post-production specialist at USC Shoah Foundation, he supervised the process of restoring the Institute's testimonies with video and audio problems. The herculean task is finally complete.

The testimony of Holocaust survivor Raphael Zimetbaum references Elise Meyer, the aunt of Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, the real-life person portrayed by Meryl Streep in the film "The Post," by Steven Spielberg.

Institute staff is attending this week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, to demonstrate New Dimensions in Testimony, the Institute’s interactive biographies that enable people to have conversations with pre-recorded video images of Holocaust survivors and other witnesses to genocide.

The world will observe International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Saturday, which is the 73rd anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp. It’s a day of somber reflection, but also a time for education so the world can be better protected from the evils of the past. Among its many programs, USC Shoah Foundation offers IWitness, a free online platform that teachers and students can use to navigate this difficult subject. Among its nearly 200 activities, IWitness has many that focus on Auschwitz, liberation and other topics of relevance to the day’s message.

"Nothing compares to eyewitness accounts," said teacher Ivy Schamis of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. "The students get a better feel for the survivor or liberator when they hear their own words and see their body language. It is very inspiring."

The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research invites research proposals from USC faculty members and graduate students for its Summer 2018 Research Fellowships.

The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research invites research proposals from USC undergraduate students for its 2018 Summer Research Fellowships.

The IWitness Video Challenge is a 21st century skill builder - teaching students how to use digital tools such as video editors to craft multimedia essays. Most importantly, the challenge provides students the opportunity to positively enhance their digital citizenship as they network and collaborate with others to deal with real world problems.

Inaugural Breslauer, Rutman & Anderson Research Fellow Diane Marie Amann gave a public lecture at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research about her research on the little-known women involved in the Nuremberg Trials.

Jean-Marc Dreyfus, PhD, Reader in Holocaust Studies in the History department at the University of Manchester (United Kingdom) has been awarded the 2018-2019 Center Research Fellowship.

Christopher R. Browning, Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has been chosen as the 2017-2018 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence.

This series will highlight one teaching activity per day for 10 days, pairing eyewitness testimony with standards-aligned lessons that transform learning.

We are saddened to learn of the recent passing of Arkadii Vaispapir, one of few people ever to have survived the Sobibór death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland during the Holocaust. He was 96.

The risk of the Holocaust is not that it will be forgotten, but that it will be embalmed and surrounded by monuments and used to absolve all future sins.   - Zygmunt Bauman 2018 Polish-Israeli Crisis: History, Trauma, and Politics of Cultural Memory The future of Polish-Israeli relations can be driven by compassion and forgiveness, or a retreat behind walls of fossilized antisemitism, essentialist prejudice, nationalistic egotism, and fear. 1968-2018

The future of Polish-Israeli relations can be driven by compassion and forgiveness, or a retreat behind walls of fossilized antisemitism, essentialist prejudice, nationalistic egotism, and fear.

In this activity, students will examine the impact that personal stories can have in inspiring others to action. They will listen and reflect on genocide survivor testimonies, discuss the concept of leadership and form belief statements about how they can become leaders in their communities.

Even absent this current era of “alternative facts” and “fake news,” the new Polish law making it a crime to point out Poland’s complicity in the Holocaust would be alarming.  But that it is occurring in today’s climate of demagoguery, heightened nationalism and ethnic tension – an unholy trio that threatens to metastasize on a global scale – is a troubling development. Poland’s effort has come under attack by Israel and stewards of Holocaust memory.

Over the course of their stay, the team built six IWitness activities focused on peace building in Rwanda. The first to go online will focus on Propaganda and Social Cohesion, which will be available for teachers and students by Tuesday, Feb. 13.

We are sorry to hear about the recent passing of Jewish Holocaust survivor Margot Schlesinger. The Chicago resident was 99. Schlesinger gave her testimony to USC Shoah Foundation in 1995. Born Maria Miriam Wind, on July 24, 1918, she was raised in Berlin. In her interview, she talks about life before the war, and living in a ghetto, before being sent to the Plaszow concentration camp, where she was put to work in Oskar Schindler’s nearby factory. She was among a group of women who were accidentally sent to the Auschwitz death camp.

The film was honored with the Creative Arts Award, VR – Documentary Jury Prize, at the awards ceremony held at the Warner Bros. Studio in Hollywood.

February is Black History Month, a time to acknowledge and celebrate the central role African Americans have made in the United States. In honor of this special time, we invite educators and students to remember history in their classrooms, utilizing this year’s thematic lens, “African Americans in Times of War.”

By collecting clips of testimony to construct a "GeoStory" - a map and timeline with videos - students can discover how changes in time and place shape history.