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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

For more than two decades, George Weiss made his way to USC Shoah Foundation almost every week, to add yet another layer to the story he is helping preserve. Sentence by sentence, memory by memory, Weiss wants to ensure that history does not get lost.

When a long-awaited maternity leave struck USC Shoah Foundation’s communications department, Holly Blackwelder was there to carry the social-media-manager torch, stepping into the position three weeks ago and embracing it with ease. A temporary successor to Deanna Hendrick, Blackwelder will continue to work as social media manager through the summer.

Melanie Dadourian is an active member of the Next Generation Council because she understands all too well the dangers of silence and denial. Her grandparents were Armenian Genocide survivors who escaped certain death in Turkey by fleeing to the United States and that history deeply affects her. “All genocides are horrible,” she says, “but ours is particularly difficult to educate people about because the Turkish government denies it to this day. It’s been written out of history.”

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.

Political scientist Yael Siman used to think she couldn’t be part of the Holocaust studies field because she’s not a historian. But after discovering USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, she has embarked on her own research project and has even begun collaborating with the Institute’s education department on new lessons for university students.

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.

Social studies teacher Linda O’Dwyer’s first experience with IWitness showed her how creative her students could be while learning how to counter hate.

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.

“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.

For the past two months, the USC Shoah Foundation communications department has had a temporary new member: Leonie Schueler-Springorum, a recent high school graduate from Germany who has been an enthusiastic assistant on a variety of communications tasks.

For a century, Michael Rettig’s family has passed down boxes upon boxes of photographs, papers, records and other documents. But because most of it was written in Armenian, no one knew much about what it all meant. When his grandmother invited him to take a look, Rettig became eager to investigate, to fill in the gaps in both scholarly research and his family's own knowledge about their fascinating history. 

Yu Jing Chen, a rising senior at Walter Payton College Preparatory High School in Chicago, teamed up with two classmates to produce the grand prize-winning entry of the 2017 IWitness Video Challenge.

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.

David Hales’ dedication to IWitness has taken him from Michigan to Prague. Hales is the social studies consultant for Wayne Regional Educational Service Agency, helping to bring best practices to classrooms in the 33 school districts in Wayne County, Mich., through teacher trainings, workshops and meetings. He was introduced to IWitness through USC Shoah Foundation’s IWitness Detroit program, which launched in 2015 in order to expand the use of IWitness in Michigan.

Acadia Grantham decided to take action against bullying in her IWitness Video Challenge entry, “Silence,” which won second place in the 2017 national contest. The IWitness Video Challenge asks students to submit short videos to show how they were inspired by testimony to make positive choices and create value in their community. The contest is open to middle and high school students across the United States and Canada (except Quebec). 

IWitness Video Challenge winner Natalia Wang was inspired by testimony in IWitness to share a message of acceptance with her whole school. Natalia and her teammates Alana Chandler and Yu Jing Chen won the 2017 contest with their video “Who Are You? Embracing Identity in Our Community.” The three are rising seniors at Walter Payton College Preparatory High School in Chicago, and were encouraged to enter the contest by their teacher Matt Silvia.

Stories have the power to educate, change people’s world view, and inspire empathy,” says David Zaslav, a member of USC Shoah Foundation’s Executive Committee and the president and CEO of Discovery Communications. “It’s a kind of understanding that can’t be replicated by history books.”

He was under five years old at the time, but World War II left an indelible mark on Louis Schmidt. He’s never forgotten the air raid drills, seeing his uncles in military uniform, or looking at pictures of prisoners of war in Life magazine. So when Steven Spielberg announced after he won the Oscar for Schindler’s List in 1994 that he was setting up a foundation to record interviews with 50,000 Holocaust survivors, Schmidt didn’t hesitate.

Working on assignment from her teacher Katherine Rastrick, Acadia Grantham constructed a video about speaking out against bullying and won second place in the 2017 IWitness Video Challenge.

After discovering Professor Melissa Kravetz’s IWitness “digital essay” assignment on an internet forum for historians, Visiting Assistant Professor of History April Trask developed her own assignment for her students at Amherst College that many students say is one of the most meaningful they’ve done. Trask has long been interested in digital pedagogy and wanted to find digital resources for her history students at Amherst that offered more than just a digital presentation of traditional written materials, she said.

Peggy Walker’s students at McCall Middle School in Massachusetts have changed the way they do research based on their experience with IWitness. Walker first began using IWitness last year, after using educational resources she found on the USC Shoah Foundation website. She began exploring IWitness and said she “immediately” saw the potential it could have for her students.

Suzi Weiss-Fischmann’s mother survived Auschwitz because upon arrival to the camp she was sent to the line to the right designated for slave labor. Her grandmother and uncles were directed to the left, to die in gas chambers because they were considered too old or too young to work.

Shayna Kantor turned her passion for American Sign Language into her third-place winning IWitness Video Challenge project.

In one testimony in the Visual History Archive, a Rwandan Tutsi Genocide survivor recounts a disturbing story from his childhood: At his school, he and the other Tutsi students were put on lockdown in their dorms while the school administrators met with the Hutu students to tell them that their Tutsi classmates were plotting to kill them.