The documentary Two Sides of Survival just landed Winner of Best Documentary Short at the Angeles Film Festival.
Produced by USC Shoah Foundation, Two Sides of Survival brings together stories from the East and West, chronicling how Jews who fled the Nazis in Europe, and Chinese who were threatened by Japanese occupation, improbably found refuge close to one another in the 1930’s and during World War II.
USC Shoah Foundation today launches its 2021-2022 Back to School package, a suite of testimony-based resources on IWitness to help educators navigate the complex issues created by the Covid-19 pandemic and surfaced by the recent upsurge in social movements demanding racial justice.
This year’s classroom activities and educator professional development modules are based on testimony from the Visual History Archive that help students to critically evaluate historical context, consider various perspectives and impacts, and reflect on personal connections.
Allison Somogyi earned her PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2019. Her dissertation analyzed the survival and resistance tactics employed by young Jewish women in Budapest under Arrow Cross rule and Nazi occupation and traced, through their diaries, how they navigated the fraught space available to them in the chaotic months of Nazi occupation and during the siege of Budapest. She is the winner of several awards and fellowships.
Rachel Zaretsky is in the second year of the MFA in Art program at the USC Roski School of Art and Design. She earned her BFA in Visual and Critical Studies from The School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York, and her art practice takes the form of performance, video installation and photography. She has created past artistic responses to the Miami Beach Holocaust memorial and to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Berlin.
Chad Gibbs is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He earned an MA in history at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and his BA in history at the University of Wyoming. His dissertation project, “Against that Darkness: Perseverance, Resistance, and Revolt at Treblinka,” adds to our understanding of life inside this camp by exploring inmate relationships - or social networks - and how prisoners leveraged these bonds to gain some measure of control over lethally restricted camp geography.
The coup in Myanmar earlier this week, ending the country's experiment with limited democracy, brought to power military and police implicated in carrying out genocide against the Rohingya people in 2017.
This troubling development could result in further consequences for the Rohingya and other ethnic minorities in Myanmar. More than 600,000 people remain at risk—perhaps now even more than ever.
Two museums have opened installations of Dimensions in Testimony, USC Shoah Foundation's interactive biography series.
In New Orleans, visitors to the National World War II Museum can interact with Staff Sergeant Alan Moskin, the first WWII Liberator filmed for Dimensions in Testimony. Moskin was a member of the 66th Infantry Regiment, 71st Infantry Division, that liberated Gunskirchen concentration camp in Austria. The exhibition runs through July 25, 2021.
USC Shoah Foundation will next week launch the U.S. premiere of The Tattooed Torah, an animated film that tells the inspirational story of a Torah rescued and restored after the Holocaust.
The film, based on Marvell Ginsburg’s beloved children’s book of the same name, recounts the true story of the rescue and restoration of a small Torah from Brno, Czechoslovakia.