Rachel Zaretsky is the 2020 Beth and Arthur Lev Student Research Fellow at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. Ms. Zaretsky just completed the first year of her MFA in Art 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.

I had the opportunity to research the USC Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive this past summer thanks to the Beth and Arthur Lev Student Research Fellowship. I was initially introduced to the archive through a course taught by Dr. Maria Zalewska in the School of Cinematic Arts entitled “Meme, Myself and I: How We Remember in the Digital Age.” Prior to the course, I was unaware of this resource at USC despite having a visual art practice deeply engaged with Holocaust remembrance and archives.

Mehmet Polatel is the 2019-2020 Junior Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. He received his Ph.D. degree from Bogazici University in Istanbul with his dissertation focusing on the emergence and transformation of the Armenian land question in the late Ottoman Empire. Prior to receiving his Ph.D., he earned a BA in International Relations from the University of Middle East Technical University in 2007, and an MA in Comparative Studies in History and Society from Koç University, Istanbul in 2009.

As a postdoctoral research fellow at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research in the 2019-2020 academic year, I carried out a research project focusing on the long-term impact of Hamidian Massacres of 1894-97 and the experiences of genocide survivors with regards to extortion, plunder, and robbery during the genocide of 1915. Since 2008, I have been working on socio-economic aspects of the genocide and of the deterioration of relations among different communities.

I did not sleep well last night. It was not the kind of sleeplessness brought on by jet lag, stress or workload. It is best described as a kind of numbness that leaves one physically discharged, emotionally drained and deeply troubled.

I just completed one the most sedentary days I’ve had in months, just sitting in a chair listening to one of the most intelligent, sophisticated, gentle, yet strong people I know tell me about his life.

In this lecture, Allison Somogyi discusses her research project considering sexual violence among Hungarian-Jewish women during the Holocaust and the ways in which victims have – and have not – talked about this (often) gender-specific trauma. In her research, she explores the difference in the ways Hungarian-Jewish women discussed sexual violence at the time of the Final Solution and its immediate aftermath by analyzing wartime diaries and letters.