Steve Acre was 9 years old during the Farhud, a Nazi-inspired pogrom in Baghdad in June, 1941. He recalls the Muslim neighbor who protected his family.

Ruth Pearl was six years old during the Farhud, a Nazi-inspired pogrom in Baghdad in June, 1941. She recalls her family's scramble to safety.

Elizabeth Spitz's father was a member of the Jewish Council in Satu Mare. On Shavuot 1944, he undertook an operation to provide challah to all the residents.

Hundreds of survivors of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide against the Tutsi congregated in Salt Lake City over the weekend for the largest-ever international gathering of survivors. Organizers say the event, hosted by IBUKA-USA and supported by a number of organizations including USC Shoah Foundation, was a safe space for survivors to discuss issues including bringing genocide perpetrators to justice, preserving the memory of victims, and fighting against revisionism.

"Research With Testimonies: Featuring the Center's 2021 Lev Student Research Fellows” Nicholas Bredie (USC PhD candidate in Literature and Creative Writing) and Atharva Tewari (USC undergraduate student, Global Studies and Journalism major) 2021 Beth and Arthur Lev Student Research Fellow  April 12, 2022

As a novelist, I am fascinated by decisions. Choice, real or imagined, is what separates tragedy from mythology. Decisions, always made with incomplete understanding, shape the arc of lives and narrative.

Nicholas Bredie is the 2021 Beth and Arthur Lev Student Research Fellow at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research and a PhD candidate in the Department of Literature and Creative Writing at USC. He is the author of Not Constantinople (Dzanc Books), a novel based on his three years living in Istanbul, Turkey. The book was named one of the best of 2017 by The Morning News and received praise from Viet Thanh Nguyen, T. C. Boyle, Paul La Farge, and Aimee Bender.

USC Shoah Foundation has partnered with a group of scholars from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem to provide them with 1,000 transcripts from the Visual History Archive for a study that will analyze Holocaust survivor testimonies.

USC Shoah Foundation–the Institute for Visual History and Education (USC Shoah Foundation) on Wednesday welcomed Second Gentleman Douglas Emhoff to the Institute’s global headquarters on the campus of the University of Southern California.  

Amidst escalating attacks against Ukraine’s second largest city, a global team of experts worked quickly to preserve and authenticate a complex evidence base. Using photos, video, web scraping, sourced from social media and messaging platforms, engineers and lawyers worked together to produce an unbroken chain of evidence on the decentralized web.

June 8, 2022, Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff visited USC Shoah Foundation and learned about our Dimension in Testimony program. While there, he got the opportunity to engage with Pinchas Gutter’s interactive biography as well as talk to the real Pinchas via Zoom. Elex Michaelson of KTTV Fox News 11 interviewed the Second Gentleman during his visit. Read more about Doug Emhoff's visit.

 

USC Shoah Foundation is bringing The Willesden Project educational initiative to a group of 500 Ukrainian refugees and other guests in Warsaw, Poland this weekend. The event will also feature a musical performance by USC Shoah Foundation partner and celebrated pianist Mona Golabek.

The Los Angeles premiere event will take place at the Museum of Tolerance at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in partnership with USC Shoah Foundation, Museum of Tolerance, and Holocaust Museum LA.

The New York premiere event will take place in Safra Hall at the Museum of Jewish Heritage on Tuesday, July 12, in partnership with USC Shoah Foundation.

"It’s very important that the Swedish Holocaust Museum is one of Sweden’s National Historical Museums. We believe the Holocaust is not a Jewish concern, but that it is, and must be, a universal one." Lizzie Oved Scheja (pictured above, full interview below), founder and director of J! Jewish Culture in Sweden, speaking earlier this month after Swedish Minister of Culture Jeanette Gustafsdotter inaugurated the country’s first museum dedicated to preserving and perpetuating the memory of the Holocaust.

On a Wednesday morning in New York in the fall of 2021, Rabbi Nicole Auerbach greeted Walter and Phyllis Loeb in Central Synagogue’s majestic sanctuary. She led them through the arch-lined nave, past row after row of pews, beyond the six sets of capital columns wrapped in colorful, gold-accented reliefs, all the way up to the intricately carved Mahagony bima, the stage where the synagogue’s rabbi and cantor preside over Shabbat and holiday services.

October 22-26, 2022 at the University of Southern California, University Park Campus Vineyard Room (USC Davidson Continuing Education Center, Lower Level) 3409 South Figueroa Street, Los Angeles, CA, 90007 On the ancestral and unceded territory of the Tongva and Kizh Nation peoples and their neighbors Join us in person or online.

July 4 is Kwibohora, also known as Rwanda Liberation Day. On this day in 1994 the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) secured the capital of Kigali and ended the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda. To commemorate Kwibohora, we spoke to three genocide survivors now residing in the United States.

Two USC scholars – graduate students Emily Geminder and Vaclav Masek - will share the Beth and Arthur Lev Student Research Fellowship for Summer 2022.

Mya Worrell (they/them) is Program Assistant at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research. They support the Center's programming, research, and outreach. They’ve been with USC since 2016, earning a BA in Gender & Sexuality Studies and American Studies & Ethnicity in 2020. They joined the Center for Advanced Genocide Research in 2021. While an undergraduate student, they interned at USC Asian Pacific American Student Services and Kaya Press, assisting with events and developing programming.

Raíssa Alonso, a PhD candidate in Social History at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, has been awarded the 2022-2023 Margee and Douglas Greenberg Research Fellowship at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research. She will be in residence at the Center in March 2023 to conduct research for her dissertation, “The ‘Other Germany’ in Brazil and the United States: Intellectuals in Exile and the Fight Against Nazism (1933-1959).”

Carli Snyder, a PhD candidate in History at the City University of New York (CUNY), has been awarded the 2022-2023 USC Shoah Foundation USC Shoah Foundation Robert J. Katz Research Fellowship in Genocide Studies. She will be in residence at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research in January 2023 to conduct research for her dissertation “‘The Flesh of the Facts’”: Toward a Feminist Holocaust Consciousness."

Ryan Cheuk Him Sun, a PhD candidate in History at the University of British Columbia, Canada, has been awarded the 2022-2023 Breslauer, Rutman, and Anderson Research Fellowship at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research. He will be in residence at the Center for a month during the Spring 2023 semester.

An online event featuring #LastSeen Project Manager Alina Bothe Organized by the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research  Cosponsored by the Consortium of Higher Education Centers for Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Studies

USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of our friend Max Eisen, a Holocaust survivor who returned to Auschwitz-Birkenau more than 20 times as an educator and testified at the trials of two SS guards in 2015, more than 70 years after his entire family was killed in Nazi concentration camps. Max’s memoir, By Chance Alone: A Remarkable True Story of Courage and Survival at Auschwitz, was the 2019 winner of Canada Reads, a Canadian Broadcasting Company “battle of the books” program, and was shortlisted for the RBC Taylor Prize in 2017. 

USC Shoah Foundation and the Museum of Jewish Heritage are joining forces on July 12 to host the official New York City premiere of My Name Is Sara, a feature film based on the true story of a young girl’s survival during the Holocaust while hiding in plain sight in the Ukrainian countryside. Produced in association with USC Shoah Foundation, the film was an Official Selection at over 50 festivals internationally, taking home five Best Feature Awards. Strand Releasing will bring the movie to New York theatres on July 13, 2022 and nationwide beginning July 22, 2022.

July 11 marks 26 years since the Srebrenica genocide, the biggest in a cluster of massacres that occurred as part of the campaign of ethnic cleansing in eastern parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina during the 1992-1995 war in the country. It’s the day in 1995 that Bosnian Serb forces led by General Ratko Mladic overran the enclave of Srebrenica, the town in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina the United Nations had formally designated as a “safe area” in 1993. 

Holocaust survivor and USC Shoah Foundation friend Max Eisen passed away earlier this month, leaving a unique legacy forged by harrowing wartime experiences, 20 return trips to Auschwitz-Birkenau as an educator, and the testimony he gave against two SS guards in Germany beginning in 2015.

An online lecture by Antara Chatterjee (Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Bhopal, India) lnaugural Strauss Fellow at the Center for Medicine, Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Cedars-Sinai Visiting scholar at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research, June-July 2022