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

 

Survivors and their testimonies have been central to Holocaust research and memorial culture. Even before the end of the Shoah, survivor historians in parts of Eastern Europe liberated from Nazi occupation collected testimonies and conducted interviews with fellow survivors.

In an effort to spark a social movement against hatred in all forms, USC Shoah Foundation, established by Steven Spielberg after his experience filming “Schindler’s List”— which gave voice to survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides through  education and action – and Discovery Education, today announced the Teaching with Testimony 2019 Stronger Than Hate Challenge winners.

Early this year, when the Swedish History Museum opened its exhibit about the Holocaust – an exhibit that includes USC Shoah Foundation testimonies and some of its interactive biographies – it marked the state-funded museum’s first foray into the topic. The exhibit has been a major success, say two Swedish museum professionals who played a prominent role in the installation, and who came to USC Shoah Foundation’s headquarters in Los Angeles last week to discuss taking the partnership to the next level.

Painter David Kassan has sat with survivors of the Holocaust for countless hours during the past five years, carefully listening to their stories of pain, grief, resilience and quiet victory.

Jewish track-and-field athlete Margaret Lambert remembers the pressure she felt when competing in the Adolf Hitler Stadium during the 1936 Olympic tryouts for a non-Jewish audience that objected to her presence. Maria Breitinger had her decathelon medal denied by her antisemitic school principal. Jules Forgacs remembers his first soccer match after liberation.

We are saddened to hear of the recent passing of Jack Welner, who survived a Jewish ghetto in Poland, a labor camp near the Dachau concentration camp in Germany, and the Auschwitz Nazi death camp in Poland – where his mother was murdered on arrival – before immigrating to Denver, Colorado, where he began a new life. He was 98. When Welner gave his testimony to USC Shoah Foundation in 1995, it changed his life.

The Institute for Visual History and Education introduces its first-ever testimony-based podcast, We Share the Same Sky. In a seven-episode arc, We Share the Same Sky presents an intimate portrait of Rachael Cerrotti’s family history and her own personal journey of love and loss as she retraces the steps of her grandmother, Hana Seckel-Drucker, who was displaced across Europe during and in the wake of World War II.

Max Glauben was 13 when his family’s apartment was destroyed in the historic battle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Eva Kuper was 2 when her mother’s cousin rescued her from a train in the frantic moments before it headed to the Treblinka death camp. Both lost parents and other relatives in the Holocaust. And both are among the four Holocaust survivors whose testimonies USC Shoah Foundation is recording this week using cutting-edge, 360-degree filming techniques at the physical locations of their pre-war and wartime experiences, as well as their places of liberation.

In 2020, on Indigenous Peoples' Day (formerly known as Columbus Day) -- October 12, 2020 -- the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research will launch a three-day international conference entitled “Mass Violence and Its Lasting Impact on Indigenous Peoples - The Case of the Americas and Australia/Pacific Region”.