Ian Zdanowicz is making the most out of his month at USC Shoah Foundation. Zdanowicz is the recipient of the Visiting PhD Fellowship from the USC Dornsife 2020 Genocide Resistance Research Cluster, which is led by USC Shoah Foundation executive director Stephen Smith and Wolf Gruener, Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies and Professor of History.

Yehuda Bauer and Xu Xin have each led vastly different lives. But they both ended up as two of the world’s most respected and influential Holocaust scholars. For Bauer, the journey began in Czechoslovakia, where he was born in 1926. He and his family immigrated to Israel in 1939, just before World War II, and he graduated from Cardiff University in Wales after fighting in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. He received his PhD in 1960 at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and began teaching at its Institute for Contemporary Jewry the following year.

Rosalie Franks first heard about Steven Spielberg’s foundation for interviewing Holocaust survivors from an article in the Palm Beach Post in the spring of 1994. Nearly twenty years later, she says that article has transformed her life. Franks, a former fourth grade teacher and television reporter, is a professor at Rhode Island’s Roger Williams University. After reading that article in the Palm Beach Post, she applied to be an interviewer and attended a training in New York that November.

Bryan Kessler has made it his life’s mission to teach and memorialize the Holocaust.

Among her many accomplishments as (to name a few) a USC Levan Institute undergraduate scholar, intern at KAYA Press, singer in the USC Collegium early music program and USC Shoah Foundation intern, Orli Robin has a particularly unique bragging right. She’s the first student to begin work on USC’s brand-new Resistance to Genocide minor.

Seventeen years after his grandmother Celina Biniaz gave testimony, Alex Biniaz-Harris is carrying on the family name at USC Shoah Foundation. Biniaz-Harris ’15 is a music and business double major at USC and an intern at USC Shoah Foundation. Born and raised in Washington, DC, he grew up visiting his grandparents in Southern California, and during his freshman year at USC his grandmother Celina introduced him to the USC Shoah Foundation.

By the time they’re 88 years old, most people start thinking about slowing down. But not Claude Lanzmann. The French journalist and documentarian is about to release his seventh film, The Last of the Unjust – a three hour and 40 minute examination of Rabbi Benjamin Murmelstein, the last president of the Jewish Council of the Theresienstadt ghetto in Czechoslovakia.