LOS ANGELES - Aug. 22, 2017 – The violent antisemitic and racist hatred seen in Charlottesville, Virginia, earlier this month combined Nazi ideology with white supremacy and drew from the dark historical legacies of the Holocaust and slavery. This hatred revealed the fissures of a long-standing American cultural and identity crisis that requires long-term strategies to provide safe ways to explore identity and difference.

USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research staff are in Australia this month for several presentations and a workshop centered on the Visual History Archive and testimony-based research.

Holocaust survivor Zenon Neumark and Guatemalan Genocide survivor Aracely Garrido shared their stories of survival and their messages for the next generation at a Genocide Awarenes Month event hosted by DEFY, USC Shoah Foundation’s student organization.

Griffin Williams is challenging assumptions held by some of the most famous names in Holocaust scholarship as a DEFY Undergraduate Research Fellow at USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research this summer.

Holocaust survivor Zenon Neumark and Guatemalan Genocide survivor Aracely Garrido are set to share their stories of survival and take questions from the audience.

The lecture will discuss how the East Galician town of Buczacz was transformed from a site of coexistence, where Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews had lived side-by-side for centuries, into a site of genocide.

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.

We at USC Shoah Foundation are saddened to hear of the passing of our beloved friend, Holocaust survivor and renowned artist Alice Lok Cahana, who passed away on November 28 at age 88. Through her internationally acclaimed artwork, writings, and public speaking, Alice put forth a message to the world that both memorialized those who perished during the Holocaust and celebrated the strength of the human spirit.

We at USC Shoah Foundation are saddened to hear of the passing of our beloved friend, Holocaust survivor and renowned artist Alice Lok Cahana, who passed away on November 28 at age 88. Through her internationally acclaimed artwork, writings, and public speaking, Alice put forth a message to the world that both memorialized those who perished during the Holocaust and celebrated the strength of the human spirit.

One of the world’s leading experts on the subject of the Holocaust is coming to USC Shoah Foundation’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research, where he will further develop his current project about Jewish-Arab relations in Israel and Palestine, the Center announced today.

USC Shoah Foundation’s soon-to-launch IWitness initiative, called “100 Days to Inspire Respect,” provides teachers of civics, history, English and other subjects with 100 thought-provoking resources that tackle hate, racism, intolerance, xenophobia and more.

What are the pillars of modern democracy and how can democracy be defended in days of crisis? These questions keep coming to me these days, when Poland faces a really serious crisis that so far has caused a huge polarization in Polish society that divides neighbors, colleagues, friends, even families. Being an educator for almost 30 years, teaching first young students, then teenagers and finally teachers about history, civil rights and human rights, I have realized what a huge setback the Polish educational system has suffered.

Two supporters of USC Shoah Foundation, Leonard Blavatnik and Trevor Pears, and Holocaust survivor Frank Lowy were awarded knighthoods in Queen Elizabeth II’s 2017 Birthday Honors List.

The initiative will support educators by providing them with tools and training to responsibly engage their students now and into the future.

USC Shoah Foundation is saddened to learn of the passing of Holocaust survivor Curt Lowens, a wartime hero who became a well-known character actor when he moved to the United States. He was 91. Born Curt Lowenstein on Nov. 17, 1925 in Germany, Lowen and his family had planned to emigrate to the United States as World War II was starting, but they were stopped from leaving the Netherlands when the Germans invaded that country. He was briefly deported to the Westerbork concentration camp in 1943, but he was released because of his father’s business connections.

USC Shoah Foundation is saddened to learn of the passing of Holocaust survivor Curt Lowens, a wartime hero who became a well-known character actor when he moved to the United States. He was 91. Born Curt Lowenstein on Nov. 17, 1925 in Germany, Lowen and his family had planned to emigrate to the United States as World War II was starting, but they were stopped from leaving the Netherlands when the Germans invaded that country. He was briefly deported to the Westerbork concentration camp in 1943, but he was released because of his father’s business connections.

USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research’s 2017 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence Omer Bartov began his residence today with a Facebook Live interview about his work.

McBride will first give a lunchtime workshop on how to use the Visual History Archive in research and teaching. At 7 p.m., he will give a lecture "Of course, they were Neighbors": Testimony, Archives and the Holocaust in Ukraine.” Both will be held at Belk Library and Information Commons room 114.

At the behest of his father, 17-year-old Erwin Rautenberg boarded a steamer for South America in 1937 to escape Nazi Germany. His brother, sister, and parents planned to join him, but never made it. His father died in 1938, soon after being
forced into the German army. The rest of the family was killed during the Holocaust.

At a time of heightened political uncertainty and polarization, middle and high school teachers are in need of easy-to-use resources that encourage their students to grapple with some of the most difficult but important topics: hate, racism, intolerance and xenophobia.

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.

The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research organized a symposium in the Fall to honor the work of leading Holocaust scholar David Cesarani from Great Britain, who died just weeks after being named by the USC Shoah Foundation the inaugural Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence. These are the remarks made by Rob Rozett at the event.

One feature of her research is examining the role of the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive interviews in the construction of social memory of the Holocaust in the Soviet Jewish community and more widely in the post-Soviet society. During her month-long residency at the Center, Rebrova examined some of the USC Shoah Foundation’s institutional records about the selection, training, and methodology of interviewers in Russia.

The foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” (German acronym EVZ) is hosting an international workshop on the use of Holocaust survivor testimonies in education January 9-11.

USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research staff will be traveling around the world this summer to host academic workshops about the Visual History Archive.

Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Yom HaShoah as it’s known in Hebrew, commemorates and honors the victims and survivors of the Holocaust. This year, people around the world will remember the victims of the Holocaust April 23- 24, 2017.

Director of USC Shoah Foundation’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research Wolf Gruner will moderate a panel at UCLA exploring the historical and cultural contexts of the works of Rabbi Joachim Prinz and composer Kurt Weill right before World War II.

The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research and the International Institute for Holocaust Research, Yad Vashem wish to announce the third joint workshop for advanced PhD candidates working on Holocaust topics.

LOS ANGELES – April 26, 2017 – Scant attention has been paid to the key roles women played in the Nuremberg Trials that held Nazi perpetrators to account for their role in the Holocaust. This is the main focus of a dissertation by Diane Amann, associate dean at the University of Georgia School of Law. She will expand on her work in January 2018 when she comes as a fellow to conduct research at USC Shoah Foundation’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research at the University of Southern California.

The group visiting the Institute’s office on Tuesday were students in Robert Hernandez’ digital journalism class at USC.