Summer might be a break for students, but as an educator, I know teachers are busy enhancing their skills and knowledge to improve their curriculum and students’ overall experience in their classrooms. As you contemplate lesson plans for the upcoming year, will you be planning a unit or lesson about the Holocaust? Do you feel you have enough knowledge about the topic to teach it well? How will you introduce your students to that history and experiences? What readings and resources will you use? What approach will you take with this sensitive topic?

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:

USC Shoah Foundation has established four “mirror sites” for the Visual History Archive, guaranteeing that a fully-functional Visual History Archive will exist in perpetuity outside its home at the University of Southern California.

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.”

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

Holocaust survivor Miriam Brysk describes the discrimination she experienced as a woman in college and in her post-doctorate work.

Omer Bartov, the 2017 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence and John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History at Brown University, gave the Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar Annual Lecture at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research focusing on his upcoming book about the East Galician town of Buczacz, which transformed from a site of coexistence, where Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews had lived side-by-side for centuries, into a site of genocide.

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.”

USC Shoah Foundation Executive Director Stephen Smith is an executive producer of the film, and most of the survivors featured in the film also gave their testimonies to USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive.

After hundreds of motorcyclists ride through Rhode Island on June 9, they will sit down to a Shabbat dinner and learn about USC Shoah Foundation’s New Dimensions in Testimony.

Charlotte talks about Althea Jenkins, the woman who taught her to speak English in Providence, Rhode Island. Althea was a great teacher and loved Charlotte and her family.

The art is black and white and full color; impressionistic and starkly realistic; hopeful for the future and filled with sorrow for the past. And it was all inspired by testimony from the Visual History Archive.

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.

Enrico discusses June 10, 1940, the day Italy declared war on Britain and France. That day, the Germans swept the city to take the Jews from their homes. He was able to escape hours before he was to be caught. 

As it nears two years of official programming, the IWitness Detroit program has changed the face of testimony-based education in Michigan.

After seeing his students’ remarkable achievements both inside and outside the classroom, Matt Silvia thought they could make a real difference by entering the IWitness Video Challenge. And he was right. Silvia’s students at Chicago’s Walter Payton College Preparatory Alana Chandler, Yu Jing Chen and Natalia Wang are the grand prize winners of the 2017 IWitness Video Challenge for their video “Who Are You? Embracing Identity in Our Community.”

The grand prize winner of the 2017 IWitness Video Challenge, by Yu Jing Chen, Alana Chandler and Natalia Wang of Walter Payton College Preparatory, Chicago. The project inspires students to illustrate and share the various traits that make up their identities.

Second place winner of the 2017 IWitness Video Challenge. By Acadia Grantham

Third place winner of the 2017 IWitness Video Challenge. By Shayna Kantor

A group of students from Chicago who inspired their fellow students to embrace each other’s unique identity has won the 2017 IWitness Video Challenge sponsored by USC Shoah Foundation.

Los Angeles, June 13, 2017 – A group of students from Chicago who inspired their fellow students to embrace each other’s unique identity has won the 2017 IWitness Video Challenge sponsored by USC Shoah Foundation.

Wolf Gruner, director of USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, is in Oxford, Frankfurt and Berlin this week speaking about his research and his latest book on the persecution of Jews in Bohemia and Moravia during the Holocaust.

There are still spots available for educators to participate in the Holocaust Educators Network Summer Seminar on Holocaust education and social justice, to be held July 23-29, 2017.

IWitness Video Challenge winner Alana Chandler gravitated toward the subject of identity in her project because she has always grappled with her own. Growing up Jewish and Japanese (and attending a Jewish middle school and Japanese Saturday school), Alana said she often felt torn between the two sides of her identity. At the middle school, kids joked about her Japanese heritage, and at Saturday school, kids expressed confusion about her religion.

The staff at USC Shoah Foundation is saddened to learn about recent the passing of Asa Shapiro, father of board member Mickey Shapiro and Holocaust survivor.

When Park Avenue Synagogue began preparing for its women’s trip to Poland, they turned to IWitness to help travelers prepare for the historical context of the trip.

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.

USC Shoah Foundation’s newest testimonies of Nanjing Massacre survivors and its New Dimensions in Testimony interview of Nanjing Massacre survivor Xia Shuqin are drawing closer to being made available to the public.

Jewish survivor Harry Rosenbach shares a story about what he did with one of his most prized posessions while he was attempting to flee Germany as a refugee.