Coinciding with Inauguration Day, USC Shoah Foundation debuts an initiative developed to quell some of the divides and intolerance exacerbated by the election. The 100 Days to Inspire Respect campaign starts today, its first week focusing on hate, and the power of storytelling and testimony in stopping it.

Holocaust survivor Edward Mosberg made his first trip to USC Shoah Foundation last week to learn about the Institute’s work, screen the new documentary in which he is featured, and make a special donation to Institute founder Steven Spielberg.

Join us for #IWitnessChat on Wednesday March 8, 2017 at 4pm PT/ 7pm ET to discuss how you teach with testimony to commemorate Genocide Awareness Month hosted by Facing History and Ourselves @FacingHistory.

The 27 interviews, recorded January 6-18, 2017, will bring the total number of testimonies in the collection to 103.

A public lecture by Alexander Korb (University of Leicester) 2016-2017 Center Research Fellow                  

The Fourth of July has become an annual norm for me - filled with hot dogs and hamburgers, red white and blue. However, this year is a bit different for me. Working at USC Shoah Foundation has opened my eyes, and taught me that this holiday goes far beyond the parties and decorations.

With the start of the fall semester just a month away, start marking your calendar for USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research’s exciting schedule of lectures, academic conference and other events.

Daniel Conway, Texas A&M University, and Nancy Sinkoff, Rutgers University, have both been in residence at the Center for Advanced Genocide Research this week.

Comcast Xfinity subscribers can watch the film on-demand as part of USC Shoah Foundation’s PastFORWARD broadcast through December 29.

A thematic seminar that will interweave content related to both the Holocaust and present-day experiences of intolerance and persecution. The seminar is inquiry-based, inviting teachers to acknowledge and incorporate the culture of their students into their curriculum and the broader classroom experience. The program takes a writing based approach to Holocaust and social justice education. Speakers and events will include:

The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research invites proposals for its three research fellowships for advanced-standing PhD candidates: the 2018-2019 Margee and Douglas Greenberg Research Fellowship; the 2018-2019 Robert J. Katz Research Fellowship in Genocide Studies; and the 2018-2019 Breslauer, Rutman, and Anderson Research Fellowship.

Historian Boris Adjemian gave a public lecture cosponsored by the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research and the USC Institute of Armenian Studies about the making of Armenian archival collections of survivors’ testimonies after the Armenian genocide and the evolution of their historiographical uses.

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.

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 new program includes a toolkit on IWitness and an diversity summit in winter 2017.

Lipstadt will be a special guest at an evening of conversation with USC Shoah Foundation at Aspen Jewish Community Center Wednesday, August 9 at 5 p.m. The program is complimentary and open to the public.

Zelizer will use her fellowship to teach a Ph.D. research seminar entitled “Mediating War and Genocide Through Visual Memory.”

Drag Queen, talented businessman and my icon RuPaul once stated, “If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell are you going to love somebody else?”

Led by the feature film Saving Private Ryan, viewers will explore the stories of liberators and those they liberated from genocide – acts that inspired the first moments of hope amidst the unthinkable.

A rare collection containing hundreds of artifacts and written material brought back from Nazi Germany by an American Jewish soldier has been acquired by the USC Libraries as part of a longstanding collaboration with the USC Shoah Foundation’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research.

Teresa Walch, the 2016-2017 Inaugural Robert J. Katz Research Fellow in Genocide Studies, gave a public lecture at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research focusing on the calculated and gradual exclusion of Jews from public spaces and ultimately from their own homes that began in the 1930s.

USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research and the USC Institute of Armenian Studies will co-host a public lecture by Boris Adjemian, director of Paris’s AGBU Nubar Library, on Monday, Oct. 16.

The critically acclaimed 2017 Hungarian film 1945 is the subject of a new English-language IWitness activity, 1945 – Homecoming.

The conference for policy-makers, media representatives and NGOs will focus on refugee policies from 1933 to the present day.

The sixth week of 100 Days to Inspire Respect will get students thinking about intolerance and how to counter it through acceptance and empathy.

This 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. Between 1941, when the Germans conquered the region, and 1944, when the Soviets liberated it, the entire Jewish population of Buczacz was murdered by the Nazis, with ample help from local Ukrainians, who then also ethnically cleansed the region of the Polish population. What were the reasons for this instance of communal violence, what were its dynamics, and why has it been erased from the local memory?

IWitness launched a new portal, Student Leaders, in June, dedicated to providing student leaders with testimony-based resources to help foster inclusivity and acceptance on college campuses.

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.