The film originally premiered at Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum on January 27, 2015, the commemoration ceremony for the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the camp.

USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research is offering summer fellowships for undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty at University of Southern California. The deadline to submit an application is March 31, 2016.

Educators can register for a variety of free webinars throughout October and November that will provide an introduction to the resources and teaching strategies of Echoes and Reflections.

December 15 will mark the beginning of a pilot for a new professional development offering from Echoes and Reflections: a three-hour, self-guided course that teaches educators everything they need to know about using Echoes and Reflections to teach about the Holocaust.

Robert J. Katz, one of USC Shoah Foundation’s most dedicated and long-term supporters, has announced his retirement from USC Shoah Foundation’s Board of Councilors, and that he will remain chair emeritus on the board for the next three years.

A trio of eighth-graders from New Jersey who created a poetry group that has enabled students at their school to express their hardships and appreciation for one another has won the 2016 IWitness Video Challenge sponsored by USC Shoah Foundation.

In light of the heated rhetoric that has come to characterize this historically polarized presidential campaign, USC Shoah Foundation has released a new activity on IWitness – its free online education platform for secondary students – called “Skittles, Deplorables and ‘All Lives Matter’: Leadership and Media Literacy.”

Chair/Moderadora: Susan Fitzpatrick-Behrens, Latin American Studies, CSU Northridge

Chair/Moderadora: Susan Fitzpatrick-Behrens, Latin American Studies, CSU Northridge

Kicking off this week, the challenge, which will award $10,000 in prizes overall, invites students to positively contribute to their communities, and submit short videos explaining the inspiration behind their actions and extraordinary impact. The IWitness Video Challenge is open to all secondary school students in the United States and Canada (except for Quebec) who attend public, private or home schools. Participants can access resources and submit entries at iwitness.usc.edu.

USC Shoah Foundation presents 24 stories of genocide survivors who recall their experiences as refugees in their testimonies preserved in the Visual History Archive. Each clip of testimony to inspire, inform and shed light on the impact of war, genocide and massacre forcing individuals from their homes.  

In January 2015, I had the incredible opportunity to travel to Poland with other students, as a junior intern, for USC Shoah Foundation’s and Discovery Education’s Auschwitz: Past is Present program, commemorating the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

IWitness celebrated a milestone in March: the most registrations ever in a single month. The milestone comes at a busy time for IWitness.

​USC Shoah Foundation’s consultant in Ukraine Anna Lenchovska shared the resources of USC Shoah Foundation at a roundtable discussion for educators at the Ukraine National Museum’s Memorial to the Victims of Holodomor in Kyiv on April 7.

While the average USC student was dragging themselves out of bed to make it to their first class after Spring Break, I was--rather jet-lagged--sitting in an 800 year old room cloaked in paintings of old intellectuals and world renowned writers in a tiny corridor of Hertford College at Oxford University, wondering how on Earth I could be so lucky to miss a week of school to hang out at one of the oldest, most prestigious centers of learning in the history of Western Civilization.

Maria talks about her aunt Adele Bloch-Bauer, who was painted by Gustav Kilmt in his “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer.” Nazi soldiers confiscated the painting at the start of WWII and after the war, the Austrian State Gallery claimed the painting as its own. Years later, Altmann fought to get the painting back for her family and she went before the U.S. Supreme Court in 2004. Ultimately, it was decided that the painting be sold to the Neue Galerie in New York City, and is currently worth $135 million. This is a part of the USC Shoah Foundation’s Women’s History Month Clip series.

English Translation: “Always remember what happened. Don't ever forget it, even if it starts becoming just part of history. Don't ever forget and, hopefully, that it will never happen again. Even though the world sees that it is not happening against the Jews, Genocide is still taking place—as in Serbia, in Rwanda. The world does not learn as seen with the recent rebirth of Nazism with the skinheads in Germany. Hopefully, there won't be people denying the Holocaust and people claiming that the existence of gas chambers in Auschwitz- Birkenau was invented by the Jews.

As part of the IWitness Detroit program, USC Shoah Foundation education staff hosted a half-day IWitness workshop for educators at the Macomb Intermediate School District (MISD), Michigan, last Tuesday, April 19.

IWitness has partnered with Participant Media and Bleecker Street Media to provide educational resources for the new film Denial, which tells the true story of the Holocaust denial libel trial between Deborah Lipstadt and David Irving.

The contest aims to perpetuate in students the memory of the resistance and the deportation in France during the Holocaust so that they can draw inspiration from it and draw civic lessons from it in their lives today.

A few weeks ago, a student I was interviewing for a profile I was writing on him for USC Shoah Foundation’s website said something interesting: “Growing up Jewish, the Holocaust is pretty much always there.” I could identify. As someone who went to Hebrew school twice a week, every week, from the age of 5 to 13, the Holocaust was something I was always aware of. I was taught about it frequently, both in religious and regular school.

Kiril Feferman, 2015-16 Fellow at USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, concluded his four-month fellowship with a lecture Feb. 2 at USC about stories of religiously motivated survival and rescue in the occupied Soviet territories during World War II.

Chair/Moderador: Douglas Carranza, Central American Studies, CSU Northridge

On last year’s Giving Tuesday, the USC Shoah Foundation community raised $7,000 to support programs and initiatives to help the Institute change the world through testimony. This November 29, USC Shoah Foundation is counting on you to help reach its goal of $10,000.

Chair/Moderadora: Hannah Garry, Law/International Human Rights, USC

Madley gave a lecture on a genocide that hits closer to home, at least in a geographic sense, than any other: the genocide of American Indians in California in the mid-19th century.

USC Shoah Foundation and the Latin American network of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) will convene for two days the weekend of Sept. 10-11 to discuss teaching about genocide in Latin America.

The conference is “Legal Legacies of Genocide: From Nuremberg to the International Criminal Courts.” USC Shoah Foundation Executive Director Stephen Smith is one of the presenters.

Chair/Moderadora: Marjorie Becker, History and English, USC

Never forget. Never again. These are common phrases used in Holocaust and genocide education. These are important statements especially when they evoke the real reason to study, learn, and teach about genocide. We must bring this content to students to empower them and encourage them to see beyond themselves. If done right, students become aware of the steps that lead to such atrocities. Teaching about genocide is the only way to have a lasting impact on our students, to affect their worldview, to help them understand that they can make a difference.