Students are aware of injustices around them, especially in today's political climate. Providing them a way to contribute to the solution validates their social responsibility and activates their learning. With service learning and community service becoming essential parts of curricula we as educators can inspire our students to do good in the world. This webinar will focus on the IWitness Video Challenge, an activity that gets students working for positive change in their communities.

In a world filled with counter examples, students need our guidance to find real examples of responsible, empathetic behavior. Examining ways in which people care for others by highlighting individuals who had courage to take a stand against prejudice, discrimination, and hate will provide a new authentic perspective of good. Bringing in voices of those who have helped and been helped by others is a powerful way for students to be introduced to these role models.

To help students become active civil participants of society, they need to discover and define their voice. Cultivating communication skills and digital literacy are critical to supporting students as they attempt to magnify their voices in support of others. In this webinar, resources that cultivate these skills in students will be featured. Register for the Webinar

A love of old movies drew Shiraz Bhathena into the moving image archive field. As an archivist and post-production specialist at USC Shoah Foundation, he supervised the process of restoring the Institute's testimonies with video and audio problems. The herculean task is finally complete.

The testimony of Holocaust survivor Raphael Zimetbaum references Elise Meyer, the aunt of Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, the real-life person portrayed by Meryl Streep in the film "The Post," by Steven Spielberg.

In this clip, Holocaust survivor Raphael Zimetbaum recounts how Brazilian ambassador Luis Martins de Souza Dantas granted him and his family diplomatic visas, allowing them to eventually escape to Brazil. The ambassador also happened to be married to Elise Meyer, sister of Washington Post owner Eugene Meyer, Katharine Graham's father.

Institute staff is attending this week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, to demonstrate New Dimensions in Testimony, the Institute’s interactive biographies that enable people to have conversations with pre-recorded video images of Holocaust survivors and other witnesses to genocide.

Testimony brings to life why we join World Jewish Congress and communities everywhere for International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the #WeRemember campaign.

The world will observe International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Saturday, which is the 73rd anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp. It’s a day of somber reflection, but also a time for education so the world can be better protected from the evils of the past. Among its many programs, USC Shoah Foundation offers IWitness, a free online platform that teachers and students can use to navigate this difficult subject. Among its nearly 200 activities, IWitness has many that focus on Auschwitz, liberation and other topics of relevance to the day’s message.

The top stories of 2017 including media coverage of the Institute's work throughout the year.

"Nothing compares to eyewitness accounts," said teacher Ivy Schamis of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. "The students get a better feel for the survivor or liberator when they hear their own words and see their body language. It is very inspiring."

The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research invites research proposals from USC faculty members and graduate students for its Summer 2018 Research Fellowships.

The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research invites research proposals from USC undergraduate students for its 2018 Summer Research Fellowships.

The IWitness Video Challenge is a 21st century skill builder - teaching students how to use digital tools such as video editors to craft multimedia essays. Most importantly, the challenge provides students the opportunity to positively enhance their digital citizenship as they network and collaborate with others to deal with real world problems.

Drawing on USC Shoah Foundation oral history videos, personal papers, and other sources, Dr. Diane Marie Amann's lecture situates stories of the unsung women who played vital roles at Nuremberg in the context of the Nuremberg trials themselves, international law, and the postwar global society. Diane Marie Amann is the inaugural 2017-2018 Breslauer, Rutman and Anderson Research Fellow.

This lecture is part of the series "Hidden Archives - Public Sturggles: Events Commemorating the 75th Anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising." Presented by Doheny Memorial Library and co-sponsored by the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research.

Inaugural Breslauer, Rutman & Anderson Research Fellow Diane Marie Amann gave a public lecture at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research about her research on the little-known women involved in the Nuremberg Trials.

Jean-Marc Dreyfus, PhD, Reader in Holocaust Studies in the History department at the University of Manchester (United Kingdom) has been awarded the 2018-2019 Center Research Fellowship.

Christopher R. Browning, Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has been chosen as the 2017-2018 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence.

This series will highlight one teaching activity per day for 10 days, pairing eyewitness testimony with standards-aligned lessons that transform learning.

We are saddened to learn of the recent passing of Arkadii Vaispapir, one of few people ever to have survived the Sobibór death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland during the Holocaust. He was 96.

The risk of the Holocaust is not that it will be forgotten, but that it will be embalmed and surrounded by monuments and used to absolve all future sins.   - Zygmunt Bauman 2018 Polish-Israeli Crisis: History, Trauma, and Politics of Cultural Memory The future of Polish-Israeli relations can be driven by compassion and forgiveness, or a retreat behind walls of fossilized antisemitism, essentialist prejudice, nationalistic egotism, and fear. 1968-2018

Maria Zalewska is a Ph.D. candidate in Cinema and Media Studies at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, a 2016-2018 Mellon Ph.D. Fellow in the Digital Humanities and an affiliated scholar of the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. Her research interests include cinematic representations of the Holocaust; documentary film; national and transnational modes and media of memorialization; digital humanities; politics of technologized memory; place and space in cinema; history as film/film as history; and political economy of film.

The future of Polish-Israeli relations can be driven by compassion and forgiveness, or a retreat behind walls of fossilized antisemitism, essentialist prejudice, nationalistic egotism, and fear.

In this activity, students will examine the impact that personal stories can have in inspiring others to action. They will listen and reflect on genocide survivor testimonies, discuss the concept of leadership and form belief statements about how they can become leaders in their communities.

A film screening of Pamela Yates's documentary 500 Years. Presented in partnership with the USC School of Cinematic Arts. Co-sponsored by the USC Gould Law School's Center for Law, History and Culture. 

Even absent this current era of “alternative facts” and “fake news,” the new Polish law making it a crime to point out Poland’s complicity in the Holocaust would be alarming.  But that it is occurring in today’s climate of demagoguery, heightened nationalism and ethnic tension – an unholy trio that threatens to metastasize on a global scale – is a troubling development. Poland’s effort has come under attack by Israel and stewards of Holocaust memory.

Presented in partnership with the USC Doheny Memorial Library.

A public lecture by Mélanie Péron (University of Pennsylvania) 2016 Rutman Fellow for Research and Teaching This event will take place at the University of Pennsylvania.

Over the course of their stay, the team built six IWitness activities focused on peace building in Rwanda. The first to go online will focus on Propaganda and Social Cohesion, which will be available for teachers and students by Tuesday, Feb. 13.