Musicologist Matt Lawson came to “Singing in the Lion’s Mouth: Music as Resistance to Genocide” conference hoping for feedback on one of his newest research ideas, and he wasn’t disappointed.

A few weeks ago, USC Student Body President Rini Sampath posted on her Facebook page about incidents of hatred and intolerance on campus. A Saturday night after a USC football game, Sampath had been walking down USC’s Fraternity Row when a man leaned out his frat house window and hurled a racial epithet and a beverage cup at her.

Vera Laska describes how, as a teenager, she helped Jews and French political prisoners cross the mountains from Slovakia into Hungary. This clip is part of the new Facing History and Ourselves IWitness activity Choosing to Rescue.

USC Shoah Foundation and Facing History and Ourselves have established a partnership in order to develop meaningful and engaging learning resources centered on Holocaust survivor testimonies.

Bronia Furst talks about being reunited with her family in the concentration camp in Pechora, Soviet Union. She says that her daily life was terrible because the camp was like a starvation camp and she would watch dead bodies be taken from the barracks everyday. Everyone continuously lived in fear.

Laura Pritchard Dobrin, an IWitness Teaching Fellow and educator who participated in Auschwitz: The Past is Present, gave a presentation about IWitness at the Virginia Association of Teachers of English (VATE) 2015 Annual Conference last weekend.

Liesl Loeb describes how her home was attacked during Kristallnacht. Her family's non-Jewish tenant hid the family upstairs and they listened as vandals destroyed the entire first floor of their house. This clip is part of the new IWitness activity Information Quest: Kristallnacht.

IWitness has published a new activity about Kristallnacht just in time for its 77th anniversary this November.

«Якщо у вас є цікава історія про шкільну дружбу, яка відбувалася у 1932-1933 роках, попрацюйте з нею. Діти точно її запам’ятають, а разом з нею і особливості періоду Голодомору стануть більш релевантними, діти намагатимуться зрозуміти, що відбувалося в ті часи.»- Олександр Войтенко, автор навчально-методичного семінару «Голодомор 1932-1933: людський вимір трагедії»

USC Professor of History Wolf Gruner directs USC Dornsife Center for Advance Genocide Research and sets its research agenda. Gruner also holds the Shapell- Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies at the university. An internationally recognized expert on genocide, Gruner has published 10 books and numerous articles on the Holocaust in Europe as well as on mass violence against indigenous people in Latin America.        

Polish Jewish survivor Martin Becker speaks about meeting the nephew of the great mufti al-Husseini while he studied in Egypt before World War II.Becker's testimony was recorded in 1993 by Jewish Family and Children’s Services’ (JFCS) Holocaust Center in San Francisco.

There is a current controversy about the allegation that the great mufti of Jerusalem instigated the final solution of the Nazis. While there is no doubt that Haj Amin al-Husseini, was a virulent anti-Semite, history shows that the Final Solution was conceived and implemented by Nazis and nobody else.

Families exploring USC at Trojan Family Weekend are invited to visit the USC Shoah Foundation exhibit to learn more about the Visual History Archive.

Marika Abrams talks about her experiences speaking to students about the Holocaust.

Sonya Perl discusses the Great Famine of Ukraine in 1932-1933. She says that in the years leading up to the famine, people were so hungry that they would sometimes resort to cannibalism.

Edith talks about what she has learned about her life because of the Holocaust and how it has impacted her relationship with her children. She talks about trying to open communication with future generations and serving as a role model.

USC Shoah Foundation regional consultant Anna Lenchovska and education expert Oleksandr Voitenko introduced the participants to the multimedia teacher’s guide "Ukrainian Famine of 1932-1933: The Human Dimension of the Tragedy."

A lecture by Maximilian Strnad (University of Munich)Doheny Memorial Library, Room 240

After spending three years studying and working in Armenia, Manuk Avedikyan is applying his passion for Armenian culture and history to USC Shoah Foundation’s new Armenian Genocide collection.Avedikyan is currently working with program administrator Hrag Yedalian on indexing the collection, which launched in the Visual History Archive on April 24, 2015, the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. Ninety testimonies are already indexed and viewable in the archive; Avedikyan expects to finish indexing the remaining 300 by this spring.

He is perhaps the last witness to the Final Solution. As a young prisoner at Auschwitz II-Birkenau, Dario Gabbai was chosen by the Nazis to be a Sonderkommando – Jews who were forced to usher people into gas chambers, and then haul out the bodies, take them to the crematorium, and clean up the room for the next group of victims. A few Sonderkommandos survived the war, but Gabbai believes he is the only one left alive.

Before taking his students on a tour of Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, high school history teacher Ferenc Sós turned to IWitness.Sós is a graduate of USC Shoah Foundation’s Teaching with Testimony in the 21st Century program in Budapest, which introduces teachers to the methodologies of using testimony from the Visual History Archive in their lessons. He was a member of the 2013 cohort.

USC Shoah Foundation is saddened to learn of the passing of Johnny Strange, a record-holding adventurer and supporter of USC Shoah Foundation.

The hero of Alex Teplish’s graphic novel Survivor: Aron’s Story isn’t a crime-fighter or science-fiction creature – it’s his grandfather, Holocaust survivor Aron Rabinovich.

Dead Loop, a new book written by Holocaust survivor Moris Bronshteyn, was born out of a promise he made to the other survivors he interviewed for USC Shoah Foundation.

By Eric LindbergUSC School of Social WorkAs an adoptee from Taiwan growing up in San Antonio, Texas, Priscilla Hefley struggled to find her identity.To avoid being seen as an outsider, she embraced the mainstream culture. It wasn’t until college that she began to reconnect with her roots and what it meant to be a Chinese American.“Adoptees can have a sense of not really being American and not really being Chinese,” she said. “It was a real struggle. Where exactly do I fit?”

Dan Morgan-Russell has always been very good at arguing for the importance of international action against genocide.As a member of his high school debate team in Denver, his most successful speeches were always the ones in which he spoke about human rights violations and the need for the international community to intervene. Naturally, as an undergraduate at the University of Southern California, he decided to major in international relations and wrote several papers about the Rwandan Genocide.

During one of the most joyous times in her life, 13-year-old Mia Michaels decided to honor the survivors and victims of one of the darkest periods in history. Mia’s parents, Larry Michaels and Tamar Elkeles, have been USC Shoah Foundation donors for over 10 years, and her grandfather Gidon Elkeles fled Nazi Germany at age three while many other relatives were killed in the Holocaust. When it came time for her to decide on a project for her bat mitzvah, she wanted to connect to her family history and learn about how her past is part of her future, Tamar said.