April 7 is the International Day of Reflection on the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda. The day of remembrance marks the start of the 100-day genocidal campaign in which an estimated 800,000 Rwandans—mainly Tutsis and moderate Hutus—were killed by well-organized mobs of Hutu extremists. Edith Umugiraneza, a survivor of the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda who now works for USC Shoah Foundation, says false information and manipulated facts helped ignite and sustain the violence, and even today threaten to distort our understanding of events.

April 8 is International Roma Day, an opportunity to celebrate the Romani and Sinti culture and raise awareness about the challenges faced by Europe’s largest ethnic minority. An estimated 70 to 80 percent of Europe’s Roma and Sinti population was killed by the Nazis and their Axis partners during World War Two, a genocide with impacts that reverberate through the community today.

The USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research mourns the death of Holocaust survivor Zenon Neumark, who was a close friend of the Center and passed away on March 27, 2023 at the age of 98 years old.

USC Shoah Foundation and The Latin American Network for Education on the Shoah (Red LAES) today launch an educational partnership dedicated to the study, teaching, and dissemination of Spanish-language Holocaust testimonies in Latin America. The new initiative, announced to coincide with Yom HaShoah, will undertake a range of innovative activities including the creation of a landing page on USC Shoah Foundation’s award-winning IWitness platform that will feature downloadable Spanish-language modules based on testimonies from the 56,000-strong Visual History Archive.

In July 2020, Ben Ferencz, the last remaining Nuremberg prosecutor who died earlier this month, sat for a Dimensions in Testimony Education interview. Below are excerpts from the three-day conversation, which was released today.   On his Place of Birth

Joseph Greenblatt believes it was the antisemitic taunts he endured throughout his childhood in Warsaw that led him to a life of resistance. He was a key player in the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and then took on the Germans again, this time with the Polish Home Army in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 — for which he later received a medal. Greenblatt’s testimony, recorded in New York City in 1996, is contained in USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive.

Yiddish Poet and Holocaust survivor Rikva Basman Ben-Hayim died March 22, 2023, at 98. In her March 1996 testimony, Holocaust survivor Adela Bay, who was in Kaiserwald concentration camp with Rivka, remembers the opening lines of Rivka's poem reflecting on the humanity that still remains through a person's eyes, despite the inhumanity of a shaved head and wearing a prison uniform.

As the Nazis assumed power in Germany in 1933, many artists and intellectuals opposed to the regime sought refuge in Latin America, particularly in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico.

Wonder Woman star Gal Gadot opened her Los Angeles home to friends and family earlier this week to commemorate Yom HaShoah by hosting an intimate conversation with Holocaust survivor Celina Biniaz, the youngest female on Oskar Schindler’s famed list.

USC Shoah Foundation is saddened by the passing of Alan Moskin, a Jewish veteran of the U.S. Armed Forces who, at the age of 18, helped liberate Gunskirchern, a subcamp of Mauthausen Concentration Camp, in May 1945. Later in life, Alan became a tireless advocate for Holocaust education and remembrance at schools, veterans’ groups, and in the media, speaking with candor about the horror he witnessed at the camp, the brutality of combat, and the bigotry he encountered in the U.S. Army. 

Stephen Kalmar, an activist who fled Austria in the 1930’s and emigrated to Mexico with his wife in 1940.

Heinz Geggel was Secretary of the Freies Deutschland anti-Nazi group in Cuba during World War Two.

Sedda Antekelian, a member of USC Shoah Foundation’s education team, never knew her own great grandmother had recorded testimony about surviving the Armenian Genocide. Hearing her great grandmother’s voice for the first time has brought Sedda closer to family, filled in gaps about her own history, and opened even more questions.

In this keynote from March 28, 2023, in recognition of the Mickey Shapiro Endowed Chair in Holocaust Education Research at the University of Southern California, distinguished scholar Mary Helen Immordino-Yang suggests that the foundation of the future of education is rooted in story – stories that help us care.

Between 1938 and 1940 an estimated 17,000 mostly Austrian and German Jews traveled from Europe to Shanghai, many on luxury liners. They were escaping the upsurge of violent antisemitism in Europe and headed primarily to Shanghai, at the time one of the few places in the world without any immigration barriers.

This event will be rescheduled for the Fall.

In this clip from his 2019 interview, recorded for the Visual History Archive, WWII veteran and liberator Alan Moskin speaks of the importance of giving testimony. Alan Moskin passed away in 2023 at the age of 96. Read our tribute to him.

In this presentation, Elyse Semerdjian outlines the earliest Armenian pilgrimages to the killing fields of Dayr al-Zur in the Syrian Desert. It is there that Armenians interacted with the remains of Armenians murdered during the Armenian Genocide (1915-1918) in acts of remembrance. Semerdjian discusses the origins of the now-destroyed Armenian Genocide Memorial in Dayr al-Zur and the ritual and collection habits of pilgrims that enact what she calls bone memory.

In 2018, USC Shoah Foundation launched the Last Chance Testimony Initiative to address requests from survivors who, for complex and often very personal reasons, could not come forward in the 1990s. Since the start of COVID, the foundation has received more than 400 requests from survivors to record their testimonies. We believe there are thousands more who want to tell their stories. The global pandemic has accelerated our race against time. The last chance is upon us.

USC Shoah Foundation this fall launches a new Antisemitism Lecture Series to showcase to wider audiences the latest scholarly research on the topic and convene some of the leading scholars in the field.  

In this blog, the Center's 2022-2023 Greenberg Research Fellow Raíssa Alonso reflects on resistance and the roots of her research. 

Raíssa Alonso is the 2022-2023 Margee and Douglas Greenberg Research Fellow at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research. She is a PhD candidate in Social History at the University of São Paulo in Brazil.

Robson Bello visited the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research in March 2023 as a Visiting Scholar. He earned his Bachelor's, Master's, and PhD degrees in Social History at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. His dissertation is entitled "The Playground of the Past: Videogames and the Reification of Memory, Play, and the American West" ("O Playground do Passado: Videogame e a reificação da Memória, do Lúdico e do Oeste Americano").

In this blog, Center visiting scholar Robson Bello discusses his focus on play during his month of research. 

In this talk, Renana Keydar and Eitan Wagner examine the meeting point between testimony and computation, the new possibilities inherent in such an encounter and the challenges and risks involved. They introduce the new avenues for listening to the multitude of testimonies in the archives afforded by the development of advanced computational tools. The talk presents a computational model of "distant listening," which is motivated by the moral commitment to the integrity of each testimony while simultaneously approaching the multiplicity of testimonies as such.

USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of Marta (Weiss) Wise, who was ten years old when she was liberated from Auschwitz, having endured the medical torture of Josef Mengele, along with her sister, Eva (Weiss) Slonim. She was 88. Marta and Eva were among a group of children pictured in a photograph—a still from a film shot by a Soviet cameraman soon after the liberation of Auschwitz—that became an iconic image of the horrors of the death camp where nearly one million Jews were killed during the Holocaust.

Marta describes an instance of Holocaust denial which occurred at a school where she spoke.