October 22-26, 2022 at the University of Southern California, University Park Campus Vineyard Room (USC Davidson Continuing Education Center, Lower Level) 3409 South Figueroa Street, Los Angeles, CA, 90007 On the ancestral and unceded territory of the Tongva and Kizh Nation peoples and their neighbors Join us in person or online.

July 4 is Kwibohora, also known as Rwanda Liberation Day. On this day in 1994 the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) secured the capital of Kigali and ended the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda. To commemorate Kwibohora, we spoke to three genocide survivors now residing in the United States.

Two USC scholars – graduate students Emily Geminder and Vaclav Masek - will share the Beth and Arthur Lev Student Research Fellowship for Summer 2022.

Mya Worrell (they/them) is Program Assistant at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research. They support the Center's programming, research, and outreach. They’ve been with USC since 2016, earning a BA in Gender & Sexuality Studies and American Studies & Ethnicity in 2020. They joined the Center for Advanced Genocide Research in 2021. While an undergraduate student, they interned at USC Asian Pacific American Student Services and Kaya Press, assisting with events and developing programming.

Raíssa Alonso, a PhD candidate in Social History at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, has been awarded the 2022-2023 Margee and Douglas Greenberg Research Fellowship at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research. She will be in residence at the Center in March 2023 to conduct research for her dissertation, “The ‘Other Germany’ in Brazil and the United States: Intellectuals in Exile and the Fight Against Nazism (1933-1959).”

Carli Snyder, a PhD candidate in History at the City University of New York (CUNY), has been awarded the 2022-2023 USC Shoah Foundation USC Shoah Foundation Robert J. Katz Research Fellowship in Genocide Studies. She will be in residence at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research in January 2023 to conduct research for her dissertation “‘The Flesh of the Facts’”: Toward a Feminist Holocaust Consciousness."

Ryan Cheuk Him Sun, a PhD candidate in History at the University of British Columbia, Canada, has been awarded the 2022-2023 Breslauer, Rutman, and Anderson Research Fellowship at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research. He will be in residence at the Center for a month during the Spring 2023 semester.

An online event featuring #LastSeen Project Manager Alina Bothe Organized by the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research  Cosponsored by the Consortium of Higher Education Centers for Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Studies

USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of our friend Max Eisen, a Holocaust survivor who returned to Auschwitz-Birkenau more than 20 times as an educator and testified at the trials of two SS guards in 2015, more than 70 years after his entire family was killed in Nazi concentration camps. Max’s memoir, By Chance Alone: A Remarkable True Story of Courage and Survival at Auschwitz, was the 2019 winner of Canada Reads, a Canadian Broadcasting Company “battle of the books” program, and was shortlisted for the RBC Taylor Prize in 2017. 

USC Shoah Foundation and the Museum of Jewish Heritage are joining forces on July 12 to host the official New York City premiere of My Name Is Sara, a feature film based on the true story of a young girl’s survival during the Holocaust while hiding in plain sight in the Ukrainian countryside. Produced in association with USC Shoah Foundation, the film was an Official Selection at over 50 festivals internationally, taking home five Best Feature Awards. Strand Releasing will bring the movie to New York theatres on July 13, 2022 and nationwide beginning July 22, 2022.

July 11 marks 26 years since the Srebrenica genocide, the biggest in a cluster of massacres that occurred as part of the campaign of ethnic cleansing in eastern parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina during the 1992-1995 war in the country. It’s the day in 1995 that Bosnian Serb forces led by General Ratko Mladic overran the enclave of Srebrenica, the town in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina the United Nations had formally designated as a “safe area” in 1993. 

Holocaust survivor and USC Shoah Foundation friend Max Eisen passed away earlier this month, leaving a unique legacy forged by harrowing wartime experiences, 20 return trips to Auschwitz-Birkenau as an educator, and the testimony he gave against two SS guards in Germany beginning in 2015.

An online lecture by Antara Chatterjee (Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Bhopal, India) lnaugural Strauss Fellow at the Center for Medicine, Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Cedars-Sinai Visiting scholar at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research, June-July 2022

Our longtime friend Pinchas Gutter turns 90 today! The survivor of six German Nazi concentration camps has shared his remarkable story with USC Shoah Foundation in a variety of formats over the years, including as a Dimensions in Testimony interactive biography that has been featured by media outlets including CBS 60 Minutes and the New York Times. Earlier this year Pinchas sat down with us to reflect on contemporary events and his experiences. 

Grace develops content and strategies to promote the Institute’s programs. Grace received her bachelor’s degree in journalism from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and her master’s in public relations and advertising from USC Annenberg. While studying at USC, Grace worked with USC Shoah Foundation as the Celina Biniaz Intern.

For the first time in two years, USC Shoah Foundation welcomed students to its international headquarters at USC for the fifth annual Leadership Workshop-Action and Values.  Eighteen rising ninth to 12th-grade students, selected from across the country, participated in the July 10 to 15 seminars, field trips, discussions, and group projects while based in USC dorms. 

If you are in the Aspen, CO, area, come learn about our testimony-based work and interact with Holocaust survivors via Dimensions in Testimony, as seen on 60 Minutes. Families are welcome. Refreshments will be served.

Aspen Film in partnership with USC Shoah Foundation is proud to present a special family event featuring two short films: The Tattooed Torah and Ruth: A Little Girl's Big Journey. Free to the public.

A University of California linguist has been awarded a $470,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to analyze Yiddish-language testimonies contained in USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive.

August 2 was Roma Holocaust Memorial Day, the anniversary of the day in 1944 that nearly 3,000 Roma and Sinti women, men and children in Auschwitz-Birkenau’s Zigeunerlager (then known as the “Gypsy family camp”) were killed in the concentration camp’s gas chambers.

Each year, the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research hosts a team of scholars from different universities, different countries, and different academic disciplines for one week so that they can develop and discuss a collaborative, innovative, and interdisciplinary research project in the fi

When Zuzanna Surowy needed to make herself cry as the lead actress in the Holocaust-era feature film My Name Is Sara, she followed the advice of her co-star to “put a demon inside of her” – to imagine something so tragic it would bring tears to her eyes. It was much harder for Surowy, then 15, to follow the second half of that directive: to leave the demon on the set.

A public lecture by the 2022-2023 Interdisciplinary Research Week team (Join us in person for this lecture or attend virtually on Zoom)

USC Shoah Foundation today presents the first of two events in Aspen, Colorado hosted by Melinda Goldrich, a prominent member of the Aspen philanthropic community who serves on USC Shoah Foundation’s Board of Councilors’ Executive Committee.

In recognition of its pioneering work advancing Holocaust and Genocide Studies since its inception in 2014, the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research has been awarded the honor of hosting the next biennial meeting of the International Network of Genocide Scholars (INoGS). The INoGS 9th International Conference on Genocide will take place in June 2024 at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles and coincide with the Center’s 10-year anniversary celebration.

USC Shoah Foundation today launches its 500th IWitness activity with release of In Lisa's Footsteps, a primary level IWalk based on Mona Golabek’s acclaimed The Children of Willesden Lane books. In Lisa's Footsteps tells the story of Golabek’s mother, Lisa Jura, a young Holocaust survivor who in 1938 escaped from Vienna to London on the Kindertransport.

Join MacArthur Grant-winner Dr. Josh Kun of USC and UCLA's Dr. Todd Presner in our first Scholar Lab webinar focusing on the question "Why the Jews?". Dr. Alexis Lerner will moderate. Free to the public.