Director Steven Spielberg founded Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation in 1994 to videotape and preserve interviews with Holocaust survivors.
By 2001, we had collected 52,000 testimonies. Our Visual History Archive now contains almost 57,000 searchable testimonies, the largest such collection in the world.
We started digitizing our collection in 2008 and we constantly update our preservation systems. We hold 12 patents on digital collection management technologies that we developed.
In 2023, users viewed 223 million minutes of testimony across all our platforms, including our Visual History Archive, YouTube channel, website, and IWitness educational platform.
In January 2006, the Shoah Foundation moved from Universal Studios to the USC campus in Los Angeles, joining the vibrant and engaged community of faculty, researchers, and students. In 2023, we opened offices at USC’s Washington, D.C., campus.
Expanding Research Horizons
Researchers, students, journalists, policymakers, storytellers, and the public turn to our Visual History Archive to enrich and expand their understanding of history. With its wealth of testimonies, tools, and resources, the archive is vital for deepening knowledge and fostering meaningful insights.
A walk through our history, from VHS tapes in the backlots of Universal Studios to our state-the-art technology center and elegant headquarters at USC.
The USC Shoah Foundation and The Latin American Network for Education on the Shoah (Red LAES) have launched a new educational web page featuring the first Spanish-language Dimensions in Testimony (DiT), an interactive biography that invites students to engage in conversation with the recorded testimony of a Holocaust survivor. Read More
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. Read More
Making DiT accessible at no-cost to educators and students through IWitness provides students anywhere in the world with the opportunity to have a conversational experience with survivors of the Holocaust and other witnesses to history. And at the Holocaust & Genocide Centres in Johannesburg and Durban, that’s exactly what students did, with a total of 400 learners interfacing with an interactive recorded video of Pinchas, a Jewish survivor of six Nazi concentration camps. Read More
USC Shoah Foundation and Discovery Education today launched the fourth annual Stronger Than Hate Challenge offering students the opportunity to win $10,000 in prizes.
The challenge encourages students aged 13-18 in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada to work individually or in groups of 2-4 on multimedia projects that demonstrate the power of story to create a community that is stronger than hate. Read More
USC Shoah Foundation and partners Nickelodeon and The Conscious Kid today launch a pair of Talk and Take Action: Guides to Countering Antisemitism that provide teachers and parents with content and tools to talk with children about the discrimination and hate directed at the Jewish community in the United States. Read More
USC Shoah Foundation and The Conscious Kid are partnering to develop and implement a series of grade K-5 resources and education initiatives to counter antisemitism and raise awareness to appreciate cultural, ethnic and religious diversity.
The Conscious Kid was founded in 2016 by Katie Ishizuka and Ramon Stephens, both parents of color who found a lack of diverse representation in children’s literature at their local library when looking for reading material for their young sons. Read More
