Our longtime friend Pinchas Gutter turns 90 today! The survivor of six German Nazi concentration camps has shared his remarkable story with USC Shoah Foundation in a variety of formats over the years, including as a Dimensions in Testimony interactive biography that has been featured by media outlets including CBS 60 Minutes and the New York Times. Earlier this year Pinchas sat down with us to reflect on contemporary events and his experiences. 

Grace develops content and strategies to promote the Institute’s programs. Grace received her bachelor’s degree in journalism from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and her master’s in public relations and advertising from USC Annenberg. While studying at USC, Grace worked with USC Shoah Foundation as the Celina Biniaz Intern.

For the first time in two years, USC Shoah Foundation welcomed students to its international headquarters at USC for the fifth annual Leadership Workshop-Action and Values.  Eighteen rising ninth to 12th-grade students, selected from across the country, participated in the July 10 to 15 seminars, field trips, discussions, and group projects while based in USC dorms. 

If you are in the Aspen, CO, area, come learn about our testimony-based work and interact with Holocaust survivors via Dimensions in Testimony, as seen on 60 Minutes. Families are welcome. Refreshments will be served.

Aspen Film in partnership with USC Shoah Foundation is proud to present a special family event featuring two short films: The Tattooed Torah and Ruth: A Little Girl's Big Journey. Free to the public.

A University of California linguist has been awarded a $470,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to analyze Yiddish-language testimonies contained in USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive.

August 2 was Roma Holocaust Memorial Day, the anniversary of the day in 1944 that nearly 3,000 Roma and Sinti women, men and children in Auschwitz-Birkenau’s Zigeunerlager (then known as the “Gypsy family camp”) were killed in the concentration camp’s gas chambers.

Each year, the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research hosts a team of scholars from different universities, different countries, and different academic disciplines for one week so that they can develop and discuss a collaborative, innovative, and interdisciplinary research project in the fi

When Zuzanna Surowy needed to make herself cry as the lead actress in the Holocaust-era feature film My Name Is Sara, she followed the advice of her co-star to “put a demon inside of her” – to imagine something so tragic it would bring tears to her eyes. It was much harder for Surowy, then 15, to follow the second half of that directive: to leave the demon on the set.

A public lecture by the 2022-2023 Interdisciplinary Research Week team (Join us in person for this lecture or attend virtually on Zoom)

USC Shoah Foundation today presents the first of two events in Aspen, Colorado hosted by Melinda Goldrich, a prominent member of the Aspen philanthropic community who serves on USC Shoah Foundation’s Board of Councilors’ Executive Committee.

In recognition of its pioneering work advancing Holocaust and Genocide Studies since its inception in 2014, the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research has been awarded the honor of hosting the next biennial meeting of the International Network of Genocide Scholars (INoGS). The INoGS 9th International Conference on Genocide will take place in June 2024 at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles and coincide with the Center’s 10-year anniversary celebration.

USC Shoah Foundation today launches its 500th IWitness activity with release of In Lisa's Footsteps, a primary level IWalk based on Mona Golabek’s acclaimed The Children of Willesden Lane books. In Lisa's Footsteps tells the story of Golabek’s mother, Lisa Jura, a young Holocaust survivor who in 1938 escaped from Vienna to London on the Kindertransport.

Join MacArthur Grant-winner Dr. Josh Kun of USC and UCLA's Dr. Todd Presner in our first Scholar Lab webinar focusing on the question "Why the Jews?". Dr. Alexis Lerner will moderate. Free to the public.

The European Parliament Liaison Office in Washington, D.C. and Outside the Box [Office], in cooperation with the USC Schwarzenegger Institute and USC Shoah Foundation, invite you and a guest to attend a screening of Quo Vadis, Aida? written & directed by Jasmila Zbanic, and produced by Damir Ibrahimovich and Jasmila Zbanic.

“Why the Jews?” Join us for another exploration of this question in the second event of USC Shoah Foundation’s Scholar Lab on Antisemitism event series. This moderated discussion will feature Dr. Jonathan Judaken of Rhodes College and Dr. Jeffrey Veidlinger of the University of Michigan, both the members of the Scholar Lab on Antisemitism program. As part of the discussion, Dr. Judaken and Dr.

Inside a Warsaw light stage surrounded by nine cameras, prominent historian and journalist Marian Turski in late June completed the first ever Polish-language Dimensions in Testimony (DiT) interview. Conducted by USC Shoah Foundation and the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw (POLIN), Turski’s interview was a truly international collaboration involving 15 team members from Belgium, Germany, Hungary, Poland, the U.K and the U.S.

USC Shoah Foundation is accepting applications for USC student leaders to take part in the upcoming Stronger Than Hate Student Leadership Summit. Triggered by the deadly white nationalist rally of August 2017 in Charlottesville, VA, USC Shoah Foundation’s Stronger Than Hate initiative draws on the power of eyewitness testimony to help students and the general public recognize and counter antisemitism, racism, xenophobia and other forms of hatred.

Eugenia Adler was 17 at the start of World War II. She survived the Warsaw Ghetto and Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek concentration camps, and spent time fighting with the partisans. In this clip, she recalls finding shelter with a frightened horse as Germany bombed Warsaw in September 1939. More clips from survivors on the beginning of World War II: Rosette Baronoff on the Breakout of War David Bayer remembers the Invasion of Poland

USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of our friend Phillip Maisel, who died in Melbourne, Australia on August 22 just days after celebrating his 100th birthday. Born in Vilnus (now Lithuania) in 1922, Maisel lived through forced labor camps in Estonia, Germany and Poland before emigrating to Australia and going on to record more than 1,500 testimonies of his fellow Holocaust survivors. He called each recorded testimony “a miracle” and thereby earned the nickname “the keeper of miracles.” His memoir, published last year, was called The Keeper of Miracles.

Join Dr. Mehnaz Afridi of Manhattan College and Dr. Sara Lipton of Stonybrook University. As part of the discussion, Dr. Afridi and Dr. Lipton will present on their research projects examining antisemitism in the Arab world and representations of Jews in medieval Christian sermons, respectively, focusing on the insights they gained into the causes, manifestations and consequences of antisemitism through history and in relation to religion. The discussion will be moderated by Dr. Jessica Marglin, Associate Professor of Religion at USC.

USC Shoah Foundation with its partner the Schindler’s Ark Foundation has added a tour of Oskar Schindler’s former factory in what is now the Czech Republic to its mobile IWalk application, enabling smartphone users to explore the site where the German businessman sheltered more than 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust.

The USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research invites research proposals from USC undergraduate students and USC graduate students for the 2023 Beth and Arthur Lev Student Research Fellowship. The fellowship provides $1,500 support for USC undergraduate students or $3,000 support for USC graduate students doing research focused on the testimonies of the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive and/or other related USC resources and collections for one month during the summer of 2023. The fellowship is open to USC undergraduate students and graduate students of all disciplines.

In the wake of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsis in Rwanda, government officials, memory workers, and human rights activists have all deployed a litany of Holocaust references — from discussions of “Never Again” to allusions to Primo Levi’s “grey zone.” Drawing upon research conducted with testimonies from the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, Charlotte Kiechel (Visiting Assistant Professor, Williams College) will illuminate the global uses of Holocaust memory by examining Rwandan governmental forces use of Holocaust references.  

A public lecture by Charlotte Kiechel (Williams College) 2021-2022 USC Shoah Foundation Robert J. Katz Research Fellow in Genocide Studies (Join us in person for this lecture or attend virtually on Zoom) Organized by the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research and the USC Shoah Foundation

The pages of my copy of The Giver are totally worn. The cover has been folded and there are subsequent pages with the same type of tear. On the bottom right corner is an advertisement for a special low price of $2.99 and in the upper right corner there is the embedded medal of the John Newbery Prize, one of the most prestigious prizes in literature.

George reflects on the importance of learning from the Holocaust and working to make the world a better place.