Less than a week after the neo-Nazi rallies in Charlottesville, Virginia, USC Shoah Foundation received a call from Blake Humphrey, student body president of West Virginia University. How could he work with USC Shoah Foundation to speak out against this blatant display of hatred and bigotry?

Back to School with IWitness 2018: IWitness University


Much of the content is geared toward addressing some of the many conflicts that came to light during and in the wake of the neo-Nazi, white supremacist rallies in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 15, 2017, such as the importance of speaking out against hate, promoting tolerance and acceptance, and embracing diversity.

Armed with insights gathered during her two-week research trip to USC Shoah Foundation, Professor Maria Rita Corticelli is ready to begin building an archive of testimonies of minority groups who have experienced various forms of mass violence, including genocide and ethnic cleansing, in Iraq.

“It’s something that is absolutely missing because there is nothing on Iraq regarding genocides committed there, not only the last one by ISIS but the ones committed before,” Corticelli said. “There is no centralized database where these testimonies are together.”

Hate Has No Place in Our Future


When I visited Nazi death camps in 2014, I viewed spaces filled with the spirits of so many lives lost and witnessed the end result of evil, intolerance, and hatred. I left the gas chambers at Auschwitz and Majdanek that summer thinking that the sick, twisted ideology that drove the Nazis and was fueled by hatred and ignorance no longer existed in the 21st Century, especially in the United States. I naively believed Nazi ideology had ceased to exist with the end of World War II and the Holocaust.
Blake Humphrey