While students across America enjoy their summer vacation, the education department at USC Shoah Foundation is busily making major new features to its award-winning IWitness educational website for educators and their students that will be ready by the time school resumes in the fall.

In this series, we take a closer look at the new features and resources coming to IWitness in time for the 2017-2018 school year.

Documentary filmmaker, historian and curator Christian Delage gave a live interview on the Institute’s Facebook page last week, wherein he discussed his past 20 years of experience researching and making films on genocide, and where his latest project on the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks diverges from standardized methods for gathering testimony.

USC undergraduates, graduate students and faculty as well as faculty from other universities are encouraged to apply.

Lucette Valensi, who lived through World War II in Tunisia as a child and is now one of the most influential scholars of North African history, recorded an interview last week for USC Shoah Foundation’s Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Collection.

As news continues to develop about the fate of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, educators can draw on resources from USC Shoah Foundation to help humanize the struggles faced by young immigrants throughout history.

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Through this set of resources, students learn about the immigrant and refugee experience, including specific definitions for migrant groups, the processes by which newcomers settle into their new home countries and the complex and difficult experience it can be.

For the last four years, I have had the incredible opportunity to share the story of USC Shoah Foundation. I joined the communications team in July 2013 to manage the social media accounts for the Institute. I was excited to work at such an esteemed institution that was making a difference in the world.

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 David Silberklang at the event.

Educators share how they teach with eyewitness testimony for April's Genocide Awareness Month.

A friend asked me whether I could help her with something. She knew I work with testimonies of Holocaust survivors in education and thought I could help her. We met over a coffee in a hipster place. There, she told me that her son suddenly started talking about Hitler. He talked about him all the time. Hitler and Nazis became a permanent conversation topic at their home, and she did not know what to do. “But he is too young for what I do,” I heard myself saying.

At this time of remembrance, I hope I am incorrect in thinking that public awareness of the Shoah is eroding. Information about this act of atrocity is still proliferating, so unawareness clearly cannot be attributed to absent knowledge. There is, in fact, an incredible amount of knowledge … and a growing reluctance to understand it.

The Holocaust is inarguably the most heinous crime against a group of people we have seen in modern times. Despite decades of wrestling with how such an atrocity could have occurred and the postwar generation promising never again, history keeps repeating itself. Therefore, the collection and the custody of testimonies from those who bear witness remains a necessary task for as long as inhumanities keep occurring. Genocide and crimes against humanity transcend religions, cultures, languages, geographic regions, socioeconomics, gender, age, etc., making testimony collection across all cultures not only a moral responsibility, but imperative given the mission of USC Shoah Foundation. We know for sure that under a certain set of circumstances, genocide could happen anywhere, and again.

I recently was an expert witness from October 11-13, 2016, at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) in Phnom Penh, the so-called Khmer Rouge Tribunal that was established in 2001. When I mention this to colleagues, a typical response is, “That’s still going on?”  Indeed. Many forget the train that runs direct from USC to Long Beach takes you to the largest concentration of Cambodian survivors in the United States, where elders make daily offerings to ancestors in their homes or Buddhist temples.

In the collective memory, the February Revolution has faded or been mixed with the October Revolution, which happened eight months later and defined the trajectory of the Russian history for the next 70 years. However, the memory of the February Revolution is preserved in several eyewitness testimonies to the Holocaust in the Visual History Archive.