All this week, 25 middle and high school students from across the United States will be at USC Shoah Foundation to gain a deeper understanding of the causes and impacts of injustice and to learn about becoming active participants in civil society.

It’s hard to imagine I’m even typing this sentence, but an avowed Holocaust denier is the official Republican nominee for an upcoming congressional election in Illinois, while a man whose website warns of a “Jewish supremacy” is running in California.

Andrew Burian survived both the Birkenau and Mauthausen concentration camps as well as the infamous death march evacuations of each camp. Today, he uses the lessons of his childhood as a catalyst to fuel his lasting dedication to Holocaust education and remembrance.

Aria Razfar, a fellow in residence this summer at USC Shoah Foundation’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research, sees parallels between the status of Yiddish in pre-war Germany and the status of Black English in the U.S. public school system.

Eighty years ago, at the behest of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, representatives from 32 countries convened for a refugee conference in Evian-les-Bains, France to address a gathering storm in Nazi Germany – and discuss what to do about the intensifying persecution of Jews throughout Europe.

The event from July 6-15, 1938 would end in failure.

Kimberly Cheng, a PhD candidate in the Joint PhD Program in Hebrew and Judaic Studies and History at New York University, has been awarded the 2018-2019 Breslauer, Rutman and Anderson Research Fellowship at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. Cheng is the second recipient of the Breslauer, Rutman and Anderson Research Fellowship, and will be in residence at the Center from September to October 2018 to conduct research for her dissertation, which examines central European Jewish refugee life in Shanghai from 1937 to 1951.

Ildikó Barna, Associate Professor of Sociology, Department of Social Sciences and Program Director of the department’s Ethnic and Minority Policy MA Program at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Budapest has been awarded the 2018-2019 International Teaching Fellowship at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. The International Teaching Fellowship bestowed by the Center provides support for faculty at institutions that subscribe to the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive (VHA) to integrate testimonies into new or existing courses.