Ari Şekeryan received his PhD from the University of Oxford in 2018 and has since held research positions at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, California State University–Fresno, the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, and the University of Cambridge.

Julie Gruenbaum Fax is a content strategist and creator on our communications team, responsible for institutional storytelling, feature writing, and strategic messaging.

The USC Shoah Foundation mourns the August 3, 2023 passing of Nimrod “Zigi” Ariav, a Holocaust survivor who fought in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising and Israel’s War of Independence before becoming a leader in the Israeli aeronautics industry. He was a longtime supporter of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. He was 96. 

In the moments before Shaylee Atary Winner escaped from her home in the early morning hours of October 7, she saw her husband fighting to close the iron window grates in their safe room over the hand of a terrorist who was reaching in. With a glance, Shaylee and her husband silently agreed she would take their baby and run.

Ben Ferencz, the last remaining prosecutor from the Nuremberg Trials who passed away in Florida earlier this month, gave countless interviews over the course of his illustrious career. But surely none was longer, or more technically challenging, than the three-day testimony he gave to USC Shoah Foundation at the height of the Covid pandemic in July 2020. The need for social distancing necessitated that filming be done remotely, with boxes of sophisticated equipment shipped to Ferencz’s modest Florida home.

In this November 8, 2023 talk, Dr. Matthias Becker elaborates on his interdisciplinary and transnational project Decoding Antisemitism, which aims to develop tools for recognizing and tracking down various forms of online antisemitism, including its open and covert forms that exist in and circulate both in fringe communities as well as in mainstream discourse.

Join Dr. Matthias Becker to learn how his interdisciplinary and transnational project, Decoding Antisemitism, aims to develop tools to track online antisemitism in both fringe communities and mainstream discourse. Part of our Antisemitism Lecture Series.

We are grateful that so many of these survivors, partners, friends, and family members have entrusted us to share their stories for future generations, and for the passion and dedication they brought in support of our mission.

Gerald Szames is 2, maybe 3 years old. He is standing at the foot of the bed, looking at his mother. She is sick, propped up on a pile of pillows. He has other flashes of memories of life before the Nazis invaded his Polish shtetl of Trochenbrod in 1941, when he was four years old – his grandfather taking him to the mill, his father lifting him up to give him a candy and a kiss.

The USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research and USC Shoah Foundation present the Annual Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar Lecture by Dan Stone (Professor of Modern History and Director of the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, University of London), 2023-2024 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence. Join us in person for this lecture or attend virtually on Zoom.

Thursday, February 22, 2024 at 1:00 PM PT | 4:00 PM ET

In partnership with organizations in the United States and Israel, the USC Shoah Foundation began collecting testimony from survivors of the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, just weeks after they occurred. These testimonies will be preserved and made available to the public as part of the Visual History Archive’s Countering Antisemitism Through Testimony Collection, which documents antisemitism after 1945.

Thursday, February 1, 2024 at 1:00 PM PT | 4:00 PM ET

One morning in 1978, Theary Seng awoke alongside her younger brother in their prison cell in Boeng Rai Security Center, about 100 kilometers south of their hometown of Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The children’s mother had been in the cell the night before, but now she was gone.

Join us on April 11 as Tabarovsky presents her research on how Soviet anti-Zionist disinformation campaigns and propaganda are being reproduced by today’s young American progressives and how understanding the history can help us rethink strategies to counter contemporary antisemitism and anti-Zionism.

Will Horowitz provides external relations for the USC Shoah Foundation. Will received his bachelor’s degree in political science and his master’s degree in public administration and policy from American University. He previously worked at the Government Accountability Office, Amgen, and the American Civil Liberties Union’s Washington Legislative Office before starting at USC Shoah Foundation in 2023.

At the close of World War II, the Allies labeled survivors of the Holocaust as either displaced persons (DPs), refugees, or stateless persons. These categories included Jews, prisoners of war, Roma and Sinti, forced laborers, and perpetrators who used the chaos to hide their identity. But as the scale of the humanitarian disaster became more apparent, the Allies were forced to refine these designations. Christina Wirth, the USC Shoah Foundation's inaugural Robert J. Katz Fellow in Antisemitism Studies, explores postwar sorting processes and the roles officials and humanitarian organizations played in shaping these categories. She further examines how antisemitism contributed to the establishment of a "Jewish DP" subcategory.

With anti-Jewish rhetoric and violence on the rise around the world, the USC Shoah Foundation this fall launches the Daniel and Marisa Klass USC Shoah Foundation Lecture Series, focusing this year on Antisemitism where leading scholars will guide audiences through the latest research and explore a diversity of approaches to understanding and combating the current upsurge.