Doug works in the Institute’s technology group as a Technical Project Leader on a variety of different technology projects including the current, major re-development of the Institute’s web applications, IWitness and VHA. Doug has worked for the Shoah Foundation since 2000, starting originally as a Historical Content Analyst to help index English language testimonies and has worked in numerous roles over the years. Doug received a MA in History from California State University, Los Angeles, and both a BA in English Literature and a BS in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University.

George Clooney is well known as an actor, director, producer and writer. But it was his global humanitarian efforts that received the attention on Oct. 3 when he was honored with the Ambassador for Humanity Award by Steven Spielberg.

Over 70 new testimonies have been added to IWitness to increase the scope of experiences students can engage with. IWitness now features 1,321 video testimonies from the Visual History Archive that allows teachers and their students to search, watch, and learn directly from the eyewitness to history. IWitness activities allow students to construct multimedia projects that integrate testimony clips together with footage from other sources, as well as photographs and maps, voiceover audio, music and text.

USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education was one of a select few organizations invited by the Jewish Family and Children’s Services (JFCS) Holocaust Center to lead a workshop at the Day of Learning. The JFCS organizes the Day of Learning to help young people gain a deeper understanding of the Holocaust and patterns of genocide, and to inspire moral courage and social responsibility in the future. Its many workshops are enhanced by testimonies of Holocaust survivors and survivors of other genocides.

Four applied mathematics undergraduate students are dedicating their summer to a major research project for the USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education.

Holocaust survivor Leon Leyson passed away this January, but his story of survival as the youngest boy on Oskar Schindler’s “list” will live on in his new memoir, The Boy on the Wooden Box: How the Impossible Became Possible…on Schindler’s List, which was officially released today.

March 25, 2010: This session covers four presentations by faculty who have integrated the Institute’s testimonies into their courses in disciplines ranging from French and Italian, Didactics, Communication Studies, and Religious Studies. This session is moderated by Carolyn Ellis, Professor of Communications and Sociology, University of South Florida.

Growing up, it wasn’t terribly unusual to see people in our house with telltale tattoos on their arms. We kids somehow knew what those blurry inked numbers meant, but we also knew it wasn’t polite to ask about them. And so, I never did. And honestly, no one in my family had been so marked — the people with tattoos were mostly friends of my grandparents — so it wasn’t something I had a lot of interest in hearing about. And perhaps in an effort to protect our innocence, family elders showed no interest in talking about it.

Refreshments will be served.

September 10, 2010: the USC Shoah Foundation Institute hosted a panel discussion that addressed the role of testimony in the process of national mourning, transitional justice, and memorialization.

Kori Street, PhD, director of education for USC Shoah Foundation, will deliver a presentation about its IWitness Program at the University of Miami’s 12th annual Holocaust Teacher Summer Institute on June 13, 2013. Street’s talk, “Learning to Use Holocaust Survivor Testimony in the Classroom,” will address the program’s value in teaching eyewitness history, as well as its ability to help build digital literacy. The Holocaust Teacher Institute is sponsored by the University of Miami School of Education & Human Development and the Miami Dade County Public Schools.

Shortly after I saw Schindler’s List for the first time, I had an argument with my father about the value of such Hollywood blockbusters for teaching people about the Holocaust. We debated the following question: If Schindler’s List was the only source of information for people about the Holocaust would it perhaps be better if they did not see it at all? That is, is Schindler’s List better than nothing if what it shows is all you know about what happened to nearly six million Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe? My dad said (or shouted) yes, but I was unconvinced.

USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education co-sponsored a March 7 lecture by Dr. Cathy J. Schlund-Vials on the memory work of Cambodian Americans whose films, memoirs, and music represent a largely unexamined site of critique on Cambodian memory in the aftermath of genocide.

A Conversation Between Professors Yehuda Bauer (Hebrew University, Emeritus) and Xu Xin (Nanjing University)Noted Holocaust scholar Professor Yehuda Bauer is Professor Emeritus of History and Holocaust Studies at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Academic Advisor to Yad Vashem. Credited with widely expanding Holocaust education within Chinese academia, Professor Xu Xin is the Director of the Glazer Institute of Jewish Studies at Nanjing University, where he initiated the undergraduate and graduate Jewish Studies programs.

Dr. Dan Leshem and Dr. Amy Carnes of USC Shoah Foundation will be leading a course to Rwanda this summer that will allow USC students to study post-genocide reconstruction.  The course, Rebuilding Rwanda: Memory, Testimony, and Living Together after Genocide, was developed in conjunction with Dr.

On June 6, Steven Spielberg, Founder of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute, presented Robert A. Iger, Chairman and CEO of The Walt Disney Company, with the Institute’s highest honor, the Ambassador for Humanity Award. Iger was honored at the Institute’s annual gala, where he was recognized for his support of the Institute’s work, his longtime philanthropy, and his leadership role in corporate citizenship. The gala presenting sponsor was jcpenny. Jimmy Kimmel hosted, and Mary J. Blige gave a special musical performance.

March 25, 2010: Since the Institute’s testimonies were given around 50 years after the events described, researchers must confront issues of memory and reliability. In this session moderated by Andrea Pető (Associate Professor, Gender Studies, Central European University), Robert Rozett, (Director of Yad Vashem Libraries) addresses problems that revolve around memory and reliability. He asks whether testimonies and memoirs bring us closer than other kinds of historical documents to understanding what people went through.

Tenth grade students at Windward School in Mar Vista, California have been piloting a new IWitness activity titled What Can One Voice Tell Us About a Genocide as part of their Global Studies class.

On February 11, Dr. Howard Gardner, best known for his theory of multiple intelligences, engaged in a public conversation on the art science of 21st-century education with Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, an award-winning behavioral and social scientist and faculty member at the University of Southern California.

On February 2, we commemorated the 70th anniversary of the decisive WWII Battle of Stalingrad. That battle changed the course of the war, leading to the final victory over Nazi Germany. As many as two million lives may have been lost at Stalingrad. We invite you to watch edited and subtitled clips from testimonies of three Red Army veterans who participated in the frontline fighting. The Visual History Archive of USC Shoah Foundation contains interviews with hundreds of Allied liberators and Jewish war veterans from all fronts of WWII.

You’re invited to the USC Shoah Foundation! Free and open to the public, our monthly tours give visitors a chance to explore the life stories of survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides and to discover how their memories are being used to overcome prejudice, intolerance, and bigotry.

USC Shoah Foundation educator workshops continue increasing in number and reach. This summer, the program Teaching with Testimony in the 21st Century convened new seminars in Budapest and Prague. In addition, another workshop in Poland is scheduled for November. The program’s offerings draw participants from all across their respective nations.

The Institute has updated its Visual History Archive (VHA), which now integrates Google Maps for a new way to search the testimonies.

Kay Andrews, a lecturer at the Institute of Education’s Centre for Holocaust Education, University of London, discusses how testimony is bringing the authentic survivor voice to Holocaust education in the United Kingdom.

Claudia Ramirez Wiedeman, PhD, has joined USC Shoah Foundation as Associate Director for Educational Technologies and Training. Her duties include strategic, content, and professional development related to the Institute’s flagship web-based educational tool, IWitness, which is designed to make the Visual History Archive accessible to educators and students around the world.

USC Shoah Foundation is saddened to learn of the untimely passing of Dmytro Groisman, Ukranian human rights activist and USC Shoah Foundation interviewer. Groisman died Monday of a heart attack after a long illness, according to his colleague Maksym Butkevych. He was 41.

USC Shoah Foundation - The Institute for Visual History and Education participated in USC's Genocide Awareness week with a series of events, including an evening of dramatic arts on April 9, 2013.

You’re invited to the USC Shoah Foundation! Free and open to the public, our monthly tours give visitors a chance to explore the life stories of survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides and to discover how their memories are being used to overcome prejudice, intolerance, and bigotry.

USC Shoah Foundation director of technology Anita Pace is spending the week in Rwanda to work with Kigali Genocide Memorial Center (KGMC) staff on the possibility of building KGMC its own Genocide Archive Center. The center would be modeled after USC Shoah Foundation’s own Visual History Archive Center, which digitizes, preserves and stores its 52,000 audiovisual testimonies of survivors of the Holocaust and other genocides and provides access to the testimonies to institutions around the world.

USC Shoah Foundation is excited to announce the upcoming launch of the tablet-compatible version of its award-winning educational website IWitness. Educators and students can search, watch and engage with the testimonies in IWitness on their iPads or tablet devices after January 6, 2014.   IWitness activities can also be assigned and worked on with a tablet, although video editing will need to be done on a Flash-enabled device (laptop, desktop, etc).