Presented in partnership with the USC Doheny Memorial Library.

This series will highlight one teaching activity per day for 10 days, pairing eyewitness testimony with standards-aligned lessons that transform learning.

February is Black History Month, a time to acknowledge and celebrate the central role African Americans have made in the United States. In honor of this special time, we invite educators and students to remember history in their classrooms, utilizing this year’s thematic lens, “African Americans in Times of War.”

In this activity, students will examine the impact that personal stories can have in inspiring others to action. They will listen and reflect on genocide survivor testimonies, discuss the concept of leadership and form belief statements about how they can become leaders in their communities.

Even absent this current era of “alternative facts” and “fake news,” the new Polish law making it a crime to point out Poland’s complicity in the Holocaust would be alarming.  But that it is occurring in today’s climate of demagoguery, heightened nationalism and ethnic tension – an unholy trio that threatens to metastasize on a global scale – is a troubling development. Poland’s effort has come under attack by Israel and stewards of Holocaust memory.

The risk of the Holocaust is not that it will be forgotten, but that it will be embalmed and surrounded by monuments and used to absolve all future sins.   - Zygmunt Bauman 2018 Polish-Israeli Crisis: History, Trauma, and Politics of Cultural Memory The future of Polish-Israeli relations can be driven by compassion and forgiveness, or a retreat behind walls of fossilized antisemitism, essentialist prejudice, nationalistic egotism, and fear. 1968-2018

The future of Polish-Israeli relations can be driven by compassion and forgiveness, or a retreat behind walls of fossilized antisemitism, essentialist prejudice, nationalistic egotism, and fear.

By collecting clips of testimony to construct a "GeoStory" - a map and timeline with videos - students can discover how changes in time and place shape history.

Jean-Marc Dreyfus, PhD, Reader in Holocaust Studies in the History department at the University of Manchester (United Kingdom) has been awarded the 2018-2019 Center Research Fellowship.

Lecture by Trinity College history professor Samuel Kassow lays out the unique circumstances leading to the legendary battle. The 75th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising will be on April 19.

A public lecture by Christopher R. Browning (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) 2017-2018 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence

Rachel Herman is the Program Platforms Lead of the USC Shoah Foundation. In this role, Rachel manages IWitness, the Visual History Archive, SFI Access, Echoes & Reflections and the building of in-app and Virtual IWalks. Rachel joined the Institute in 2017, working as a content specialist with the Education team.

This lecture features two of our summer 2017 research fellows: Maria Zalewska, PhD candidate in Cinema and Media Studies and Mellon PhD Fellow in the Digital Humanities, USC School of Cinematic Arts, and Noha Ayoub, USC undergraduate student majoring in Law, History and Culture and minoring in Middle East Studies.

Maria Zalewska is a Ph.D. candidate in Cinema and Media Studies at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, a 2016-2018 Mellon Ph.D. Fellow in the Digital Humanities and an affiliated scholar of the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. Her research interests include cinematic representations of the Holocaust; documentary film; national and transnational modes and media of memorialization; digital humanities; politics of technologized memory; place and space in cinema; history as film/film as history; and political economy of film.

This lecture is part of the series "Hidden Archives - Public Sturggles: Events Commemorating the 75th Anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising." Presented by Doheny Memorial Library and co-sponsored by the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research.

At the exact moment a former student was destroying lives at Stoneman Douglas High School, a group of students inside a classroom was studying ways to make the world a better place. These were students in a Holocaust history class, where they were exploring the 1936 Olympics in an IWitness learning activity to teach them about compassion and respect, and about the perils of living a life filled with hate and violence.

A film screening of Pamela Yates's documentary 500 Years. Presented in partnership with the USC School of Cinematic Arts. Co-sponsored by the USC Gould Law School's Center for Law, History and Culture. 

Christopher R. Browning, Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has been chosen as the 2017-2018 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence.

Drawing on USC Shoah Foundation oral history videos, personal papers, and other sources, Dr. Diane Marie Amann's lecture situates stories of the unsung women who played vital roles at Nuremberg in the context of the Nuremberg trials themselves, international law, and the postwar global society. Diane Marie Amann is the inaugural 2017-2018 Breslauer, Rutman and Anderson Research Fellow.

Los Angeles, February. 13, 2018 – “The Last Goodbye,” a virtual-reality film that brings the viewer inside a Nazi concentration camp with Holocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter, won a top prize at the 2018 Lumiere Awards hosted Monday by The Advanced Imaging Society. The film was honored with the Creative Arts Award, VR – Documentary Jury Prize, at the awards ceremony held at the Warner Bros. Studio in Hollywood.

Svetlana Ushakova provides the service of research, annotation, and evaluation to the Dimensions in Testimony program. In 2014-2018, she worked at USC Shoah Foundation as an indexer and research assistant. Before she moved to the USA, she worked for ten years as a researcher at an academic institution in Russia and has several publications. Svetlana received her doctorate in Russian History from Novosibirsk State University, Russia, and her master in Library and Information Science from San Jose State University.

USC Shoah Foundation's Karen Jungblut speaks at The Berlin Conference on Myanmar Genocide about the nearly 100 video interviews recorded in Bangladesh refugee camps.

Lindsay is the Managing Director of Echoes & Reflections, the Institute's flagship Holocaust Education program in partnership with ADL and Yad Vashem. In this role, she leads strategic planning and the ongoing programmatic and operational oversight to ensure successful reach of goals and objectives of the Partnership. Lindsay holds an MEd from the University of Vermont and a BA in History from Northwestern University. She has held a range of leadership positions in the non-profit education field for more than 25 years. Lindsay is based outside of Chicago, IL.

Inaugural Breslauer, Rutman & Anderson Research Fellow Diane Marie Amann gave a public lecture at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research about her research on the little-known women involved in the Nuremberg Trials.

A public lecture by Julien Zarifian (American History, University of Cergy-Pontoise, France) 2017-2018 Fulbright Scholar, USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research This lecture is co-sponsored by the California Hub of the Institut des Amériques and by the USC Dornsife Institute of Armenian Studies.

We are saddened to learn of the recent passing of Arkadii Vaispapir, one of few people ever to have survived the Sobibór death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland during the Holocaust. He was 96.

Over the course of their stay, the team built six IWitness activities focused on peace building in Rwanda. The first to go online will focus on Propaganda and Social Cohesion, which will be available for teachers and students by Tuesday, Feb. 13.

The film was honored with the Creative Arts Award, VR – Documentary Jury Prize, at the awards ceremony held at the Warner Bros. Studio in Hollywood.