For those eager to rub shoulders with Hollywood royalty, a great place to be was the annual Ambassadors for Humanity gala, benefiting the USC Shoah Foundation — The Institute for Visual History and Education.
No question, Paula Cuéllar was born to be a human rights crusader.
Who?
She is but one example of people who walk among us with stories worth telling.
A digital literacy activity created by the USC Shoah Foundation and available on iWitness, a free online education platform, helps students understand the difference between arguments, persuasion and propaganda on social media channels.
A new initiative to digitize the invaluable testimony of Holocaust survivors should help permanently preserve this key resource for future generations, say archivists who are leading the effort.
DETROIT — On Tuesday, October 18, St. John Church of Southfield hosted Dr. Stephen Smith of the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation. Smith is the UNESCO Chair on Genocide Education; he visited the St. John Church and the adjacent Alex and Marie Manoogian Museum.
LOS ANGELES, Oct. 24 (Xinhua) -- Plainly dressed in a dark gray suit, 87-year-old Xia Shuqin seemed no different from any other suburban Chinese lady. However, her weatherworn face and her determined eyes suggested that her story was different: She had survived the Nanjing Massacre.
Oskar Schindler, look what you’ve done.
The man who personally saved some 1,200 Jews from certain extermination by the Nazis by employing them in his factories — using most of his financial resources to protect them — has been gone for more than 40 years. But his work and legacy lives on. So touched by the story he brought to life in 1993 and the subsequent reaction to his film Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg decided he had to do more.
The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research hosted Benjamin Madley Tuesday to speak about the controversial murder of as many as 16,000 Native Americans by vigilantes, state volunteer militiamen and U.S. Army soldiers during the period between 1846 and 1873.
Among world premieres unspooling this weekend at the Telluride Film Festival is a harrowing new documentary Finding Oscar, which is produced by Frank Marshall and executive produced by Steven Spielberg in association with the USC Shoah Foundation. The docu directed by Ryan Suffern will have its first showing here in the Rockies on Saturday afternoon. You can see Deadline’s premiere of the film’s trailer above.
LOS ANGELES (USC Shoah Foundation)—All testimonies from USC Shoah Foundation’s Armenian Genocide collection have been indexed and will be integrated into the Visual History Archive (VHA) in the coming months.
Indexer Manuk Avedikyan completed the last 88 of the 333 testimonies in the collection last week. The collection was first introduced with 60 testimonies that were added to the VHA on April 24, 2015, the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. Another 185 indexed testimonies were added to the collection in April of this year.
Maya Montell, Allison Vandal and Caroline Waters’ video about the creation of a poetry group at Readington Middle School has won USC Shoah Foundation’s 2016 iWitness Video Challenge. The eighth-graders’ newly created Poets Undercover Guild provides an opportunity for their peers to express their feelings and appreciation for each other by using the power of words in the sharing of poetry.
IWitness connects students with history, current events through universal human experience.
New Dimensions in Testimony is a multidisciplinary tech project that lets users converse in dialogue with Holocaust survivors.
Pinchas Gutter goes out of his way to find me biscuits. In a sun-baked living room in his north London home, he opens a packet of Rich Tea, sits down and tells me about the Holocaust. Gutter was seven years old when the second world war broke out. He lived in the Warsaw ghetto for three and a half years, took part in its uprising, survived six Nazi concentration camps – including the Majdanek extermination camp – and lived through a death march across Germany to Theresienstadt in occupied Czechoslovakia.
Experiencing the brand-new “Alternate Realities” programme at this year’s Sheffield Doc/Fest—the UK’s largest documentary film festival—was dizzying and diverse. Following on from Sundance and Cannes, which have recently made their first serious forays into virtual reality, Doc/Fest curators put 12 major VR and other interactive projects into their programme this year.
Twenty-three years since Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, he hasn’t stopped collecting testimonies of firsthand accounts from Holocaust survivors.
Today, these stories and more, totaling 53,000 tales of horror and survival, have been documented and archived at the USC Shoah Foundation — The Institute for Visual History and Education, which Spielberg founded, housed at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
In the 1990s, the USC Shoah Foundation conducted video interviews with thousands of Holocaust survivors, so that their stories are never forgotten. The nonprofit's digital library currently houses 53,000 video testimonies, and in recent years has expanded to capture testimony from those who witnessed the 1994 Rwandan Tutsi Genocide, the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, and the Armenian Genocide that coincided with World War I.
The USC Shoah Foundation announced Wednesday it is broadening access to its archive of genocide testimony by partnering with a technology company that connects researchers at universities, libraries, schools and organizations around the world. Starting immediately, ProQuest will become the exclusive distributor of the USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education’s Visual History Archive to colleges and universities around the world, except in China, according to foundation Executive Director Stephen Smith.
Nearly 80 years later, Liu Suzhen could still recall her ordeal. And when she did, her ruddy cheeks burned. She shielded her face with chapped, swollen fingers as though Japanese bombers were zooming down as she spoke. "My neighborhood was among the last to fall. When the sirens sounded, my aunt and I'd run and duck inside the bunker," said Liu, now 84, leaning on her dragon-head walking stick. "This is the history that my granddaughter has been passing on to her son."
ABINAL, Guatemala (AP) — Juan Chen Chen lit up as he recalled a childhood spent romping in the Guatemalan countryside, playing soccer and spinning tops while his parents harvested maize and squash. But his voice turned somber and his eyes wandered blankly to focus on a nonexistent horizon as he described the events of March 1980, when the army came to town. Chen managed to hide, but others weren’t so lucky.