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Kari Shagena is combining poetry and Holocaust survivor testimony to inspire empathy and action in her students following an IWitness seminar in Michigan last summer. Shagena, a language arts and social studies teacher at Richmond Middle School, was one of over dozen Michigan educators who attended USC Shoah Foundation’s IWitness Summer Institute in Farmington Hills this past August, a three-day seminar that introduced educators to everything they need to know to incorporate testimonies and activities from IWitness into their classrooms.
/ Thursday, January 5, 2017
In the field of genocide studies and human rights, storytelling is the most impactful way to give information weight. And the first step to doing justice to the stories and the survivors who provide their testimonies is ensuring they’re translated accurately and with context.
/ Wednesday, January 11, 2017
Though the topic of sexual violence against women during genocide is notoriously under-researched, sexual violence against men is even more so. And that’s what USC Shoah Foundation’s 2016-2017 A.I. and Manet Schepps Foundation Teaching Fellow at Texas A&M Tommy Curry hopes to change.
/ Tuesday, January 17, 2017
Professor Omer Bartov, considered one of the world’s leading experts on the subject of the Holocaust, will serve as the 2016-2017 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence at USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. He will be in residence at the Center May 4-11, 2017, and will give a public lecture at USC on May 8.
/ Thursday, January 19, 2017
For a historian, using a top-down approach is standard – you use government records, archives of primary and secondary sources to fulfill your research; you undress the documents and make sure they stand up, factually, and you stop there. But a bottom-up approach can provide a more complete image of an event, allowing those who lived through the time a voice in history.
/ Monday, January 23, 2017
Nancy Fudem and her son Jonathan have long been admirers of USC Shoah Foundation. Now, they have made it their mission to support its work from their home in San Francisco.
/ Thursday, January 26, 2017
Even after using testimony in her teaching and research for several years, Professor Shira Klein still discovered something new during her tenure as the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research 2016-2017 International Teaching Fellow. The annual International Teaching Fellowship is open to professors who wish to incorporate testimony into their courses and research. The chosen fellow has the opportunity to visit the Center and consult with its staff and gives a public lecture at USC about their work.
/ Tuesday, January 31, 2017
On the seventh day of USC Shoah Foundation’s 100 Days to Inspire Respect education program, a series of tweets were posted by a teacher in Alabama, using the program hashtag #100Days4Respect. “There is enough sun for everyone,” one tweet read. Another said, “Don’t hate others even if they’re different.” Still another, “Someone’s race is not their character. Don’t hate, appreciate.”
/ Friday, February 3, 2017
When USC Shoah Foundation held its first-ever Ambassadors for Humanity Gala sweepstakes, allowing one lucky winner and their guest to attend the 2016 gala and meet Steven Spielberg and honoree George Lucas, no one could have guessed that the winners would have so many remarkable parallels to USC Shoah Foundation itself.
/ Wednesday, February 8, 2017
High school English and Holocaust Literature teacher Heather Lewis first learned about “six word stories” at an educators’ conference years ago, but could never find a way to incorporate them into her curriculum – until she discovered USC Shoah Foundation’s 100 Days to Inspire Respect program.
/ Monday, February 13, 2017
Inspired by the issues affecting his students in Chicago, high school English teacher Wesley Davidson authored one of USC Shoah Foundation’s new resources for 100 Days to Inspire Respect. Davidson, an English teacher at Chicago Tech Academy, authored an IWitness activity called “To Protect and Serve: Community and Policing,” which is the featured resource today, Day 29 of 100 Days to Inspire Respect.
/ Thursday, February 16, 2017
Educators in the Detroit area are being exposed to IWitness in greater numbers than ever before with the help of Amy Bloom, Oakland Schools Intermediate School District’s Social Studies Education Consultant. Since 2015, Bloom has been involved with IWitness Detroit, USC Shoah Foundation’s initiative to widen student access to IWitness in the greater Detroit area through teacher training seminars – which range from one-day ITeach workshops to last summer’s three-day IWitness Summer Institute.
/ Tuesday, February 21, 2017
Professor Jessica Marglin is passionate about the testimonies of Sephardic Jews in the Visual History Archive, and that passion has rubbed off onto her students as well. Marglin is Ruth Ziegler Early Career Chair in Jewish Studies and Assistant Professor of Religion at the University of Southern California. She is a scholar of the history of Jews in the Middle East and teaches an undergraduate course about Sephardic Jews during the Holocaust.
/ Monday, February 27, 2017
Just over halfway into her month-long residency at USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, 2016-2017 Greenberg Research Fellow Katja Schatte has already surpassed her expectations about what she would discover in the Visual History Archive. Schatte sat down for a Facebook Live interview about her research and her fellowship at the Center. She will give a public lecture about her work on March 7 on the USC campus.
cagr / Friday, March 3, 2017
Gaelle Elalam’s professional interests don’t necessarily intersect with her work at USC Shoah Foundation, but that work is just as impactful. The wannabe engineer has been a Junior Intern for the Institute since 2015, spending one day out of the month engrossed in analyzing what attitudes breed hatred and intolerance, how you can spread positive moral authority and how you can become an active participant in civil society.
/ Thursday, March 16, 2017
Since October, once a month, every month, a group of grade school students have met either virtually or physically at the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education’s home at USC’s Leavey Library. These students are USC Shoah Foundation’s newest crop of Junior Interns, there to study what attitudes breed hatred and intolerance, how they can spread positive moral authority and be an active participant in civil society using the weight of testimony from the Visual History Archive.
/ Tuesday, March 21, 2017
Within an hour of learning about IWitness for the first time, Julie McDaniel could already envision how its testimonies and activities could enhance her work as Student Safety and Well-Being Consultant at the Oakland Schools district in Michigan.
/ Friday, March 24, 2017
They started in October – making the trip to USC Shoah Foundation’s home at USC’s Leavey Library once a month, every month to meet, either virtually or physically, and study what attitudes breed hatred and intolerance, how they can spread positive moral authority and how to use the weight of testimony from the Visual History Archive to become active participants in civil society.
/ Tuesday, March 28, 2017
Born in Bolivia, educated in Germany and now residing in Los Angeles, Sandra Gruner-Domic brings her expertise in Latin American migration and social anthropology to her role as one of the guiding forces of USC Shoah Foundation’s Guatemalan Genocide testimony collection.
/ Thursday, March 30, 2017
For the past couple years, high school English teacher Matthew Otis has incorporated IWitness into his unit on the Holocaust and intolerance. Now, IWitness’s 100 Days to Inspire Respect program has inspired him to share his students’ process of cross-cultural understanding with a larger audience. Otis, who teaches at Everett Area High School in Pennsylvania, first learned about IWitness and Echoes and Reflections at a teaching conference last year and since then has used testimony as a resource in his unit on the Holocaust.
/ Monday, April 3, 2017
For Lucy Fried, storytelling is the best way to make an impact. The high school sophomore is a Junior Intern with USC Shoah Foundation, and as such, has spent one day every month for the past five months listening to testimony from the Institute’s Visual History Archive – to the stories and memories of Holocaust and genocide survivors.
/ Thursday, April 6, 2017
Robert Ackles has slogged up the 405 from San Diego to Los Angeles once a month, every month, for almost two years. He’s sat through the heat and the desperate freeway traffic for one reason, and one reason alone: to visit USC Shoah Foundation’s home at USC’s Leavey Library as a Junior Intern. Part of a small group of young students, Ackles meets periodically to discuss and analyze such topics as hatred, prejudice, intolerance and how to stop both using positive moral guidance and active participation in society.
/ Monday, April 10, 2017
As a little kid, Toni Nickel never could settle between Sesame Street and the History Channel, her interest in other people’s stories of war piqued such that learning the colors and the order of the numbers became forever secondary. Her curiosity – specifically in the Holocaust – came to a head in college when she took a History of the Holocaust course that used the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive. There, in a classroom at Texas A&M University, Nickel knew her fate and future were sealed.
/ Thursday, April 13, 2017
“Hate starts with fear of others.” “Be informed. Don’t judge. Learn love.” “Remove appearance. We’re all the same.” Ninth graders in Sara Mehltretter’s world cultures and geography class at Tampa Catholic High School in Tampa, Fla., wrote these six-word stories and many others, and shared them with not only each other but also their whole school.
/ Monday, April 17, 2017
When students learn about refugees in IWitness, it will be Tomás Rafa’s documentary video footage of the current-day refugee crisis in Europe that will help them make connections between refugees of the past and present.
/ Thursday, April 20, 2017
Since October, Evy Stumpff has been an unconventional Junior Intern with USC Shoah Foundation. While the rest of the young interns have spent the past several months analyzing, together, what attitudes breed hatred and intolerance and how they can spread positive moral authority and become active participants in civil society – learning from USC Shoah Foundation’s IWitness activities and the Visual History Archive – Stumpff has had to leap over one major obstacle to do the same work.
/ Monday, April 24, 2017
For the past semester and a half, Nic Chavez has spent one day out of every month at USC Shoah Foundation’s home at USC’s Leavey Library, discussing with his fellow Junior Interns at the Institute what attitudes breed hatred and intolerance, and how derivatives can be quelled.
/ Thursday, April 27, 2017
Now several months into her USC Shoah Foundation Junior Internship, Mackenzie Westman, junior at Eagle Rock High School Highly Gifted Magnet, has come to understand how you can counter all of the elements that can fuel hate. The monthly meetings at the Institute, and concurrent viewings of testimony from USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, have been paramount in shaping her perception.
/ Monday, May 1, 2017
Marisa Fox-Bevilacqua grew up never knowing that her mother was a Holocaust survivor. That is, until a series of discoveries after her mother’s death led her to the truth: her mother had survived Gabersdorf, a slave labor camp for Jewish girls and young women, for four and a half years – and had never said a word about it.
/ Thursday, May 4, 2017
A little more than 70 years ago, two-year-old Mickey Shapiro arrived with his parents, Holocaust survivors Sara and Asa Shapiro, in the United States from a Displaced Persons camp in Germany. When they came to America, Mickey estimates that they had about $8 in their pocket. Sara and Asa built a life and family here in America where they worked with dedication to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive. Mickey honors his parents and carries on that legacy through his work with USC Shoah Foundation.
/ Monday, May 8, 2017

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