The USC Shoah Foundation Story
Watch our video about the Institute's history and its current mission at the University of Southern California.
The View commemorates Yom HaShoah
In this 2025 segment for Yom HaShoah, co-host Whoopi Goldberg recognizes the work of the USC Shoah Foundation
Learn more about the USC Shoah Foundation and its 30-year history.
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One of the great questions — in life, not just in VR — is how we’ll memorialize victims of mass tragedy. Technology offers myriad tools, but how to use them so that they’re effective and not exploitative? Specifically, this has been a question involving the Shoah — how will the murder of 6 million people be marked when the day comes that anyone old enough to have lived through it will have died? As the youngest survivors approach 80, it’s more than a hypothetical.
During the election, teachers around the US struggled with issues arising in their classrooms — new kinds of bullying, confusion between fact and fiction, fear. And in the 100 days since President Donald Trump was inaugurated, those topics only continued to generate challenges for teachers. The organization USC Shoah Foundation heard those concerns and developed an initiative called “100 Days to Inspire Respect” to support learning through Trump’s first 100 days in office.
There are several parallel stories told in the documentary “Finding Oscar.” The main one lays out, with traditional means, the horrific circumstances of a 1982 atrocity perpetrated by Guatemalan army commandos against the residents of a small Guatemalan village. Taking its name from the location of the raid, the so-called Dos Erres massacre left 250 civilians dead — many of them unceremoniously dumped down a well, with some thrown in while still alive — by a squad of elite military operatives, known as Kaibiles. The Kaibiles had gone in search of guerrillas they suspected of having recently ambushed government soldiers during the country’s long-running civil war with rural leftist rebels.
All of the University of Southern California (USC) Shoah Foundation’s educational resources about the Armenian Genocide can now be found on the IWitness website that launched on April 17, one week before the 102nd anniversary of the Armenian Genocide.
It’s really easy to mess up a film project about the Holocaust. The wrong tone, the wrong direction, and it can all go horribly awry. Add cutting-edge technology operated by unskilled hands to a topic as devastating as survivor testimony, and you could have a disaster. Fortunately, the VR film The Last Goodbye, which debuted at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, gets it right.