Application Open for Leadership Workshop – Action and Values, presented by the William P. Lauder Junior Internship Program this Summer

USC Shoah Foundation is now accepting applications for rising 8th–12th grade students across the country to participate in its highly competitive week-long summer program, Leadership Workshop – Action and Values.

A Tribute to Sigmund Burke, 1924-2022

By: Eli Gruen

USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of Holocaust survivor and accomplished structural engineer Sigmund Burke, who died February 6, 2022 at nearly 98 years old. He recorded his testimony with USC Shoah Foundation in 2019, at the age of 95, as part of the Last Chance Testimony Collection initiative, USC Shoah Foundation’s race-against-time effort to record the stories and perspectives of the last remaining Holocaust survivors.

Eli Gruen

The Starling Lab for Data Integrity Announces Inaugural Starling Journalism Fellows

The Starling Lab for Data Integrity (Starling Lab) today announced its inaugural class of Starling Journalism research fellows. The annual fellowship helps leading journalists from around the world use the latest advances in cryptography and Web3 technologies to protect the integrity and safety of digital content, as well as individuals working in and around the media. In an era of rampant mis- and disinformation, this timely program will apply in-field research to explore how to restore trust in digital media and underscore the legacy values of journalism.

Reclaiming the “Ruins of Memory”: Gender, Agency, and Imagination in Stories of the Shoah

Tuesday, July 8, 2025 - 09:26 PM PDT
In recounting the past, Holocaust survivors deliberately or unconsciously craft the stories they recount about the Shoah. Whether through literature, memoirs, or testimony, survivors shape stories about the past while signaling what remains unsaid. Deferred memories – stories told many decades after the events occurred – often address issues that survivors did not dare or could not bear to recount earlier. Looking at these deferred stories through the lens of gender, we will explore how survivors craft accounts that insist on reclaiming, owning, and interpreting what the writer Ida Fink called “the ruins of memory,” often against the grain and in tension with academic interpretation.

“Once We Repel the Aggressors, We Will Get Back to Work,” USC Shoah Foundation Partner Anna Lenchovska, in Ukraine

Two weeks into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, USC Shoah Foundation is extremely concerned for its partners, survivors and friends in both countries and strongly condemns the senseless loss of life.

USC Shoah Foundation has strong roots in Ukraine, having conducted 3,432 interviews in the country that form the basis for a collection of testimony-based educational programs that have reached tens of thousands of Ukrainian teachers and students.

International Women's Day

Today is International Women’s Day and this year we are honoring girls—from Holocaust Europe to Africa, from Central America to the Middle East, from occupied China to pre-war Armenia—who demonstrated extraordinary strength and resilience in the face of unimaginable horrors. Here is a selection of USC Shoah Foundation clips and films to mark the occasion.

Fifteen-year-old Eva Schloss describes the range of emotions that accompanied her liberation from Auschwitz by Red Army soldiers in 1945. 

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