Secondary school students across France are hard at work on their entries for the 2013-2014 National Contest on Resistance and Deportation – and many of them are drawing inspiration from USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive

On the heels of USC Shoah Foundation’s new partnership with the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall to collect and preserve testimony of Nanjing Massacre survivors, the educational platform Facing History and Ourselves signed an agreement to integrate three of those testimonies into its own educational materials.

USC Shoah Foundation and Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall have embarked on a historic effort to preserve the testimonies of the last survivors of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, also known as the Rape of Nanjing.

Damaged videotapes in the Visual History Archive, previously thought to be unfixable, are being restored thanks to new software developed by USC Shoah Foundation technology staff.

Aegis Trust Rwanda, The Institute of Research and Dialogue for Peace, Radio La Benevolencija and USC Shoah Foundation - the Institute for Visual History and Education are joining forces to launch a peace-building and education program in Rwanda.

Czech educators are gathering at the Academy of Sciences in Prague today to attend a conference dedicated to the "Ours or Foreign? Jews in the Czech 20th Century" project from the Jewish Museum of Prague.

The Cold War began its thaw 25 years ago, then apparently melted sufficiently for us to get on with our lives without fear. Surprisingly, the slow thaw is still in progress.

French educators are attending a Teaching with Testimony in the 21st Century workshop today and tomorrow to learn about IWitness and using testimony in the classroom.

Horst Senger reflects on the significance and effect of the film, Schindler’s List. He emphasizes on how the film revealed the atrocities of the Holocaust to the generation who lived it and also the future generations who possibly only read about it in history books.  

“Time heals all wounds,” they say. It’s difficult to find any other element in our daily lives that possesses the sobering effect that time does. It tames emotions and calms nerves. It allows for much needed reflection and analysis. And, perhaps most importantly, it brings with it resolution and closure. By any account, a century would be more than enough time to heal even the deepest wound, but, surprisingly, time’s impact isn’t always as thorough as we’d expect it to be.

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.

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 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).   

Summary: Free and open to the public, monthly Institute visits give guests 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. Description:

Summary: Free and open to the public, monthly Institute visits give guests 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. Description:

USC Shoah Foundation is issuing its first-ever call for proposals for an international conference to be held next November, inspired by the 20th anniversary of Schindler’s List.

Let's just say I throw my smartphone over the wall into the Warsaw ghetto. Along with it, I send instructions to make a video diary until the battery drains, then to wrap it in lots of newspaper before throwing it back.

USC Shoah Foundation associate director of research Dan Leshem and former Institute Fellow Jeffrey Shandler will lead a seminar about video interviews of Holocaust survivors at the Association for Jewish Scholars (AJS) conference next week.

As I write this, I am standing alongside 30 of the last 200 survivors of the Nanjing Massacre, which began 76 years ago Friday. Sirens sound around this Chinese city as the last few eyewitnesses of a massacre gather. Starting Dec. 13, 1937, and lasting six weeks, as many as 300,000 civilians were murdered during the atrocities.

Students will interact with the stories of Holocaust survivors who immigrated to America in the newest IWitness activity, “New Beginnings – Journey to America,” published today.

French film director Claude Lanzmann spoke candidly about his latest film, The Last of the Unjust, at a USC School of Cinematic Arts screening hosted by USC Shoah Foundation Tuesday night.

When I tell my fellow USC students that I’m the president of an organization called SFISA, it’s usually safe to assume that 90% of them have no idea what it is. It’s not the most elegant of acronyms and we acknowledge this. Our club’s full name – the Shoah Foundation Institute Student Association – is equally as unwieldy but at least it’s descriptive, and that’s something, right? But even if they’ve heard of our less than stellar name, they still might not know who we are or what we do. So let me take this moment to enlighten you.