USC Shoah Foundation Executive Director Stephen Smith gave the keynote address at a conference with Holocaust educators located at the site of the Warsaw Ghetto. In the U.K, he attended events celebrating the launch of the Visual History Archive at the University of Oxford. USC Shoah Foundation Director of Global Outreach Karen Jungblut was also in Poland and then attended an event in Hungary to celebrate the launch of the Visual History Archive at 40 Hungarian institutions.

Education and Outreach Specialist Sedda Antekelian and Program Officer Manuk Avedikyan shared information about the educational use of testimony in the Institute’s Visual History Archive and on the Institute’s educational website, IWitness.

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.

The more than 1,000 interviews will constitute the largest non-Holocaust-related collection to be integrated into the Institute’s Visual History Archive. It will also be the Archive’s first audio-only collection.

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

It’s been 80 years since Kristallnacht, a pogrom organized by Nazis against Jews in Germany and Austria, but as we’ve seen in recent weeks, the threat of antisemitic violence remains a horrifying possibility. Access educational resources that draw from the Institute's Visual History Archive.

My father was born and raised in Sighet, Romania, just down the road from the Elie Wiesel's simple blue childhood home. When the Nobel laureate's house was spray-painted with antisemitic slurs this summer, it felt like an attack on my own familial history.

Our thoughts are with the families and community of those who were murdered at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh -- the most deadly antisemitic attack in U.S. history. We have curated a handful of resources to help educators engage students in meaningful dialogue.

In recognition of their longstanding commitment to humanitarian causes and support of veterans, Rita Wilson and Tom Hanks were presented the Ambassador for Humanity Award by Kate Capshaw and Steven Spielberg, USC trustee and founder of USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education.

"New Perspectives on Kristallnacht: After 80 Years, the Nazi Pogrom in Global Comparison" 

This article is part of a newsletter series introducing librarians who are advocates for the VHA at their institutions.

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.

Kimberly Cheng, a PhD candidate in the Joint PhD Program in Hebrew and Judaic Studies and History at New York University, has been awarded the 2018-2019 Breslauer, Rutman and Anderson Research Fellowship at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. Cheng is the second recipient of the Breslauer, Rutman and Anderson Research Fellowship, and will be in residence at the Center from September to October 2018 to conduct research for her dissertation, which examines central European Jewish refugee life in Shanghai from 1937 to 1951.

Bieke Van Camp, a PhD candidate in Contemporary History at University Paul-Valéry, Montpellier (France), has been awarded the 2018-2019 Robert J. Katz Research Fellowship at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. Van Camp will be in residence at the Center in April 2019 in order to conduct research in the Visual History Archive to contribute to her doctoral dissertation, “The Shoah as a Social Experience and the Deportees as Social Groups. Socio-historical Comparative Approach to Italian and Dutch-Speaking Deportees.”

Although the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive is typically thought of as a way to preserve the stories of people who survived the Holocaust, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania has found a way to use the Archive to broaden the scope of memory to include not only survivors but also people who perished.

Eighty-five years ago, millions of residents of Ukraine were starved to death as a result of the Soviet-era policies under Joseph Stalin’s totalitarian regime. The man-made famine of 1932-1933, also known as Holodomor, is part of my home country’s history that I grew to fully understand only through my work at USC Shoah Foundation.

Lukas Meissel, a PhD candidate in Holocaust Studies at the University of Haifa, Israel, has been awarded the 2018-2019 Greenberg Research Fellowship at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. Meissel will be in residence at the Center for one month in early Spring 2019 to conduct research in the Visual History Archive for his doctoral dissertation, entitled “SS-Photography in Concentration Camps. Genres and Meanings of Erkennungsdienst-Photos.”

The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research first began a partnership with the Holocaust Geographies Collaborative in 2014, when the team visited the Institute to explore the ways in which the Visual History Archive can be used to create geographic visualizations of the Holocaust.

Danielle Willard-Kyle, a PhD candidate in History at Rutgers University, has been awarded the 2018-2019 Center Graduate Research Fellowship at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. Willard-Kyle will be in residence at the Center from mid-March to mid-April 2019 to conduct research for a chapter of her doctoral dissertation, “Living in Liminal Spaces: Refugees in Italian Displaced Persons Camps, 1945-1951.”

Researchers conducting the study for the Hungarian Academy of Sciences say their conclusions are all the more vital in an age where, thanks to the internet, youth are more susceptible to believing “fake information.”

The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research invites research proposals from advanced-standing Ph.D. candidates for its 2019-2020 research fellowships. Each fellowship provides $4,000 support and will be awarded to an outstanding advanced- standing Ph.D. candidate from any discipline for dissertation research focused on testimony from the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive and other USC resources.

Through their testimonies on the Visual History Archive and The 1939 Society websites, Holocaust survivors and rescuers have inspired middle and high school students from across the nation and eight countries outside of the United States to become “Messengers of Memory,” the theme of this year’s Annual Holocaust Art and Writing Contest sponsored by Chapman University and The 1939 Society.

USC Shoah Foundation’s annual Teaching with Testimony in the 21st Century program is a one-year professional development initiative for educators that begins with a six-day seminar for educators.

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.

USC Shoah Foundation and Genesis Philanthropy Group partner to create first Russian-language interactive biographies for award-winning Dimensions in Testimony program.

The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research invites applications from postdoctoral scholars for its 2019-2020 Center Junior Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. The fellowship offers an annual salary of $70,000 and will be awarded to an an outstanding junior postdoctoral scholar from any discipline who will advance genocide research through the use of the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive and other USC resources.

A public lecture by Kimberly Cheng (PhD candidate in Hebrew & Judaic Studies and History, New York University), 2018-2019 Breslauer, Rutman & Anderson Research Fellow

In a webinar interview, the film’s director and the Institute’s founder says he believes that 25 years after the release of 'Schindler's List,' the film is more important than ever. “Especially for the young people today, who face a country and a world where democracy is threatened.”