I recently emailed a teacher to ask if he was willing to be featured in a profile story on the USC Shoah Foundation website about his experiences using IWitness in his classroom. I had never been introduced to him and he had not been expecting to hear from me.

USC Shoah Foundation is hosting staff of the Guatemalan nonprofit La Fundación de Antropología Forense de Guatemala (FAFG) in Los Angeles this week so that the two organizations may learn from each other and take steps toward future collaboration.

Chance and Choice: A Survivor’s Story highlights the poem "Could Have" by Wislawa Szymborska and three specific survival events from Jewish survivor Lusia Haberfeld's testimony to convey the role of both individual choice as well as luck in surviving the Holocaust.

The conference’s first roundtable discussion will bring together four panelists from all over the world who will engage in a discussion about how digital archives can be used both to engage and inform the public and also aid scholars in their research.

In an effort to safeguard a narrative that began with the 1994 creation of the USC Shoah Foundation, Information Technology Services (ITS) has launched the process of digitizing the USC Shoah Foundation Institutional Audio-Visual Records.

Schindler’s List producer Branko Lustig will play a key role in this year’s Let’s Cee Film Festival in Vienna, which welcomes filmmakers and film enthusiasts from all over Central and Eastern Europe.

As IWitness’s community of users continues to grow, its technical specifications are upgraded to meet their needs. Students and teachers will find new features in IWitness’s video editor that will help streamline the process of constructing a video in IWitness.

Students learn about the plight of the refugees who attempted to flee Nazi Germany on the M.S. St. Louis and reflect on the world’s response to the voyage and its implications for today in Voyage of the St. Louis: From Hope to Despair.

Four of the conference’s educators will discuss how human rights and violence can be taught using digital technology and other innovative methods at the “Digital Pedagogy, Education, Human Rights and Violence Studies” roundtable, moderated by USC Shoah Foundation’s director of education, Kori Street.

USC Shoah Foundation chief technology officer Sam Gustman will return to his alma mater, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, to give a presentation about the Visual History Archive and the USC Digital Repository on Thursday.

Jared McBride, the fellowship’s debut recipient, was chosen by a panel of USC researchers and professors for the originality of his proposal and its potential to advance genocide research.

USC Shoah Foundation’s Nanjing Massacre testimony collection more than doubled in size last week when USC Shoah Foundation and Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall conducted 18 new interviews with Nanjing Massacre survivors.

In the first-ever teacher-authored IWitness activity, Writing in Exile, students close-read poetry as they learn about one woman’s experience during the Holocaust.

I recently returned to China to record audio-visual testimonies from survivors of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre. In February 2014, the Institute incorporated 12 Nanjing testimonies into its Visual History Archive, adding a new perspective to the 53,000 testimonies that we collected from the Holocaust and the Rwandan Tutsi Genocide.

Teachers from across the Netherlands participated in an IWitness training session Oct. 4, held as part of a new partnership between USC Shoah Foundation and the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

USC Shoah Foundation’s academic year programming kicks off next Monday with a screening of the documentary As Seen Through These Eyes, which tells the stories of Holocaust survivors who made art during and after World War II.

With nearly 52,000 interviews from survivors of the Holocaust and other genocides, the archive of audio-visual testimony assembled and maintained by USC Shoah Foundation is so abundant it would take at least 12 years to watch it from beginning to end. And that’s assuming the footage would be rolling 24 hours a day, seven days a week. When I started my new job here at the Institute, I was struck by this statistic, which adequately conveys the scope of this incredible resource.

For the first time, USC Shoah Foundation has published a lesson that was created by a teacher in the Teaching with Testimony in the 21st Century professional development program.

USC Shoah Foundation’s educational resources can help educators observe National Bullying Prevention Month in October by teaching students about acceptance, resilience and other relevant topics.

The new activity Growing Up Behind the Barbed Wire at Auschwitz is part of IWitness’s Auschwitz: The Past is Present content to commemorate the upcoming 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

I adored my father and admired him greatly. Harold Eisenberg was a good man in every sense of the word. He spoke about his life in Opatow, Poland before World War II and even his experience during the Holocaust, but he also lived very much in the present, working hard to provide for his family.  The business he started after the war became the foundation for much of our extended family’s success. I was named for his mother and his sister, who both perished in the Holocaust, and my father would often look at me tenderly and tell me how much I reminded him of his mother. 

Lemkin is the subject of a new documentary called "Watchers of the Sky," now playing in select theaters. It is inspired by U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power’s Pulitzer-Prize winning book A Problem from Hell.

Senior scholars in Holocaust and genocide studies are invited to apply for the 2015-2016 Center Research Fellowship. The deadline is Dec. 1, 2014.

The latest evaluation of IWitness in Rwanda shows that students’ interest in civic engagement and making a difference after using IWitness has increased significantly since Phase 1 of the program.

USC Shoah Foundation, Aegis Trust Rwanda and the Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (NIOD) conducted a feasibility study this month to determine how case files from trials of genocide perpetrators could be digitized and preserved.

The "Auschwitz – Art in the Face of Death" Mini Quest asks students to consider artwork produced as a response to the experience of Auschwitz-Birkenau and to produce their own artistic responses to what they learned.

Pinchas Gutter stepped onto the bimah at the Kiever Synagogue in Toronto, Canada, where for the 27th consecutive time he was about to lead the Yom Kippur services.  He stood tall in his white robe breathing deeply surrounded by eight white-clad Torah scrolls, each held by a leaders of the congregation.  The scrolls appear to jostle for position, their silver shields and finials glistening as PInchas intones the ancient supplication, 'Kol Nidrei'.  But on the bimah there are more than the eight men holding Torah scrolls, because gathered around him are also the ghosts of the Gerrer Hasidim o

USC Shoah Foundation and its partner in the Czech Republic, PANT, have been busy leading workshops and seminars about the Visual History Archive and IWitness for educators.

USC Shoah Foundation and ADL hosted the first session of this year’s Holocaust Education Institute Friday, Oct. 24, which was attended by an enthusiastic group of over 50 educators from the Los Angeles area.

I have only known Harry Reicher for three months, and yet today I say goodbye to him as an old friend. I don’t know why, but I wasn’t expecting to meet a devout and practicing Jew the day he first walked into the USC Shoah Foundation office, but Harry’s devotion to his religious life radiated from him the moment he said hello.