The newest activity in IWitness provides students with an opportunity to learn about the ill-fated voyage of the MS St. Louis in 1939.

USC and UCLA may be rivals on the football field, but they came together for a very important cause last week - the Armenian Genocide collection.

For the first time, USC Shoah Foundation has published a lesson that was created by a teacher in the Teaching with Testimony in the 21st Century professional development program.

July 24, 2014: Harry Reicher, Professor of Law at University of Pennsylvania and USC Shoah Foundation's inaugural Rutman Teaching Fellow, utilized his fellowship to collect Holocaust survivor testimony content he could utilize in his classes, which currently make liberal use of multimedia content.Featuring historical footage, Nazi propaganda film, modern cinema clips, and Visual History Archive testimony, Reicher's lecture provided an overview of the Nazi legal system and demonstrated the value of film in teaching this subject.

March 28, 2013:  The Student Voices short film contest enables USC students to join the conversation about genocide and human rights by using the Visual History Archive to craft visual arguments around these topics. The top films were screened at a special event hosted by the USC School of Cinematic Arts. Following the screening, the USC Shoah Foundation moderated a discussion with the judges, including Ari Sandel, who won the 2006 Academy Award for Best Short Film for West Bank Story.

November 15, 2012: Dr. Sean Field discussed oral histories in the context of both the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Centre for Popular Memory in South Africa and approaches to studying memories of violence.

Rena Finder survived the Holocaust by working in Oscar Schindler’s factory. Finder is a featured speaker for the Holocaust Memorial Ceremony at the United Nations on January 27, the International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust.

Dieses Video ist ein herunterladbarer Zusammenschnitt von mehreren Zeitzeugen-Interviews des USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archivs, welche mit jüdischen Überlebenden geführt wurden, die in der polnischen Stadt Oświęcim geboren wurden und aufgewachsen sind. Heute kennt man Oświęcim als eine Stadt, die von dem Lagerkomplex Auschwitz gezeichnet ist.

University of Southern California students will study post-genocide reconstruction this summer on the second annual Problems Without Passports trip to Rwanda. The course is led by USC Shoah Foundation's Dan Leshem and Amy Carnes.

USC Shoah Foundation has partnered with the Center for Research on Intercultural Relations at Sacred Heart Catholic University in Italy to produce the multimedia website Giving Memory a Future: The Sinti and Roma in Italy and Around the World.

As the new school year begins, USC Shoah Foundation’s IWitness consultants are busy introducing teachers to IWitness and teaching with testimony at seminars and workshops around the country.

USC Shoah Foundation’s Nanjing Massacre testimony collection more than doubled in size last week when USC Shoah Foundation and Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall conducted 18 new interviews with Nanjing Massacre survivors.

The designers at Olson, an advertising and digital agency in Minneapolis, typically spend their days creating ad campaigns for clients including McDonalds, Target and General Mills. But for the last six months, a team from Olson has undertaken a project of an entirely different sort.

I was born and brought up in a university town in the Czech Republic called Olomouc. It had a small Jewish community.   My father is a writer and academic.  Five years ago he interviewed Milos Dobry who was a prominent member of the Olomouc Jewish community and a long-term Holocaust survivor.  His story was fascinating - about how he and his brother had survived Terezín and Auschwitz and how Milos had gone on to have a successful career as an inventor and sports personality.  I went to meet Milos Dobry personally to further interview him about his history.

Anna Lenchovska, M.D. in Psychology, is the international consultant in Ukraine for USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education. For nearly 10 years she has helped develop educational resources on how to use video testimonies in Ukraine classrooms.  Lenchovska also serves as executive director of the Congress of National Minorities of Ukraine. Prior to this she worked in the Ukrainian NGO “Institute of Jewish Studies” and a clinic for child psychiatry and psychotherapy.

The email wasn’t so different from many others I’ve received since I started working at the USC Shoah Foundation last summer. A woman named Olga in Germany was moved by watching survivor Paula Lebovics talk about her stolen childhood during the Holocaust. Olga had a young daughter of her own and felt an immediate bond with Paula, who was taken to Auschwitz when she was the same age. And so she wanted to contact her.

Aegis Trust Rwanda’s new director of education took a deep dive into USC Shoah Foundation’s work in Rwanda during his visit to Los Angeles last week.

Senior scholars in Holocaust and genocide studies are invited to apply for the 2015-2016 Center Research Fellowship. The deadline is Dec. 1, 2014.

March 24, 2014: 2014 Senior Institute Fellow Dr. Douglas Greenberg, Rutgers University Distinguished Professor of History, discusses a place that was in six different countries in the 20th century: the region of Wolyn, which is now in Ukraine. He is currently conducting research to reconstruct the experience of the survivors of the Holocaust who came from Wolyn, where 250,000 Jews were murdered before the death camps were completely operational.

From the spring 2014 issue of PastForward: French film director and documentarian Claude Lanzmann visited USC Shoah Foundation for the first time this December, bringing with him his latest film and a simple request for the future.

The other morning I checked the BBC News website like I always do only to discover that French film director Alain Resnais had passed away at the age of ninety-one. Resnais’s films frequently explored the relationship between memory, consciousness, and the imagination in a non-linear manner and his innovative method of filmmaking won him numerous awards and prestige throughout his prolific career.

USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education was founded to capture the voices, emotions and faces of those who suffered, yet miraculously survived the most heinous crime ever committed against humanity by humanity. The idea was to record individual and collective memories that would be preserved in perpetuity as a seminal educational tool to inform current and future generations that incitement, hate and violence against a person or a group can ultimately lead to death, genocide and ultimately extermination.

More than 100 Auschwitz survivors from at least 17 countries will travel to Poland to participate in the observance of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi German concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz on 27 January 2015, on the occasion of International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The official event will be organized by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and the International Auschwitz Council. The World Jewish Congress and the USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education will be among the organizations supporting this commemorative event.

The finalists have been chosen and now it’s up to the viewers to select their favorite entry from the Student Voices Short Film Contest.

For help researching the deportation of Jews in France during the Holocaust, French scholars turned to the USC Shoah Foundation and its French liaison Emmanuel Debono.

All over the world, Jewish survivors of the Holocaust era are giving testimony – but not for USC Shoah Foundation’s original collection of over 51,000 Holocaust survivor testimonies. Instead, they are the first participants of the new Testimonies of North Africa and the Middle East project.

The University of Southern California has established the Center for Advanced Genocide Research to study how and why such instances of mass violence occur, and how to intervene in the cycle that can lead to them.

On July 16 -17, 1942, over 13,000 Jews from Paris and its suburbs were rounded up by French police in the early morning hours and forcefully taken from their homes to both the Vélodrome d’Hiver, a winter cycling stadium in Paris, and to the Drancy internment camp.

March 6, 2014: Student Voices invites all USC graduate and undergraduate students, regardless of major, to create short films that incorporate testimony from USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive.This year’s themes were: Preserving Humanity, Renewing Rwanda, and Risking Everything. All themes represent the coinciding 20th anniversaries of Schindler’s List in 2013 and the founding of the Shoah Foundation and the Rwanda Tutsi genocide in 2014.The video shows USC Shoah Foundation’s annual awards ceremony. 

For the next 70 days USC Shoah Foundation will highlight testimony clips from people who witnessed firsthand the horrors of Auschwitz.