Rachel Zaretsky is the 2020 Beth and Arthur Lev Student Research Fellow at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. Ms. Zaretsky just completed the first year of her MFA in Art at the USC Roski School of Art and Design. She earned her BFA in Visual and Critical Studies from The School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York, and her art practice takes the form of performance, video installation and photography. She has created past artistic responses to the Miami Beach Holocaust memorial and to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Berlin.

 

USC Shoah Foundation, National Historical Museums in Sweden, and the Institution for Jewish Culture in Sweden Begin Filming Socially Distant Swedish-Language Dimensions in Testimony Interviews

USC Shoah Foundation—working with on-site partners National Historical Museums in Sweden and the Institution for Jewish Culture in Sweden—recently began filming two Swedish-language Dimensions in Testimony interviews in Stockholm, Sweden utilizing innovative social distancing and filming techniques.

Institute Announces New Partnership with Ancestry® to Provide Free Access to Searchable Data from Nearly 50,000 Jewish Holocaust Survivor Testimonies

By: USC Shoah Foundation

USC Shoah Foundation announced a new partnership with Ancestry® to provide free access to searchable data from nearly 50,000 Jewish Holocaust survivor testimonies that are in the Visual History Archive® (VHA).

“We are grateful that Ancestry is providing access to this initial set of metadata and enhancing the discoverability of our archive and this critically important history,” said Stephen Smith, Finci-Viterbi Executive Director at USC Shoah Foundation.

Here’s how it works:

USC Shoah Foundation

Archival Ingenuity Saves Mold-Ridden Testimonies from Oblivion

By: Daryn Eller

Alan Auyeung pulled on a pair of latex gloves and a N95 face mask. For good measure, he placed a pair of protective goggles over his eyes too. A trip to the supermarket? In these Covid-19 times, it could have been but, in fact, Auyeung was preparing for a task of quite a different nature: saving the testimonies of Holocaust survivors, whose eye witness accounts of Nazi atrocities were at risk of being eaten away by mold.

Daryn Eller

Mindful Explorations on IWitness

Wednesday, July 2, 2025 - 06:02 AM PDT
Join Lesly Culp and Sedda Antekelian as they introduce Mindful Explorations on IWitness—10-minute testimony-based activities designed to be taught daily—so you can make social-emotional learning a stabilizing presence in the tumult of your students’ lives.

Walking a Fine Line: Hungarian-Jewish Survivors and the Discourse Surrounding Sexual Violence in Postwar Testimonies

Wednesday, July 2, 2025 - 06:02 AM PDT

An online lecture by Allison Somogyi (Yale University and University of Southern California)
2019-2020 USC-Yale Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Organized by the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research
Supported by the USC Libraries Collection Convergence Initiative 

Subscribe to