Ildikó Barna, Associate Professor of Sociology, Department of Social Sciences and Program Director of the department’s Ethnic and Minority Policy MA Program at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Budapest has been awarded the 2018-2019 International Teaching Fellowship at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. The International Teaching Fellowship bestowed by the Center provides support for faculty at institutions that subscribe to the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive (VHA) to integrate testimonies into new or existing courses.

The conference seeks to address a dearth of psychological support for hundreds of thousands of refugees left traumatized by the reign of the Islamic State – also known as ISIS – between 2014 and 2017.

Belle Mayer of New York was a prosecutor on the team that tried I.G. Farben, one of Nazi Germany’s largest government contractors, which had a large stake in creating the Zyklon-B poison used in death-camp gas chambers.

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.

During the Institute's inaugural summer William P. Lauder Internship Program, about two-dozen young people came to USC Shoah Foundation from across the country to participate in the intensive program, which focused on the causes and impacts of injustice and the ways an individual can respond.

Call for Papers: International Conference "Memory through the Screen: Polish Cinema and WWII" October 18-19, 2018 USC Department of Slavic Language and Literature's 3rd Annual Film Conference at the University of Southern California When a film is created, it is created in a language, which is not only about words, but also the way that very language encodes our perception of the world, our understanding of it. –Andrzej Wajda  

A consortium of more than 40 Hungarian academic institutions and public libraries signs on, bringing the total number of worldwide subscribers to 138.

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.

Public lecture by Danielle Willard-Kyle (PhD candidate, Rutgers University) 2019 Center Graduate Research Fellow

The former goaltender for a well-known Rwandan team literally owes his life to soccer. Now he uses soccer to promote tolerance and unity. This year, he was recognized by Queen Elizabeth.

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.

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.

The USC Shoah Foundation is looking for students in 7th– 12th grades who are interested in participating in its highly competitive William P. Lauder Junior Internship Program. The program provides a dynamic and unique learning opportunity for students to engage with testimonies – personal stories – from survivors and witnesses of genocide.

  Call for Papers: The Future of Holocaust Testimonies V: An International Conference and Workshop March 11-13, 2019  The Holocaust Studies Program of Western Galilee College, the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, University of Southern California, and the Center for Judaic, Holocaust and Peace Studies, Appalachian State University, announce the fifth international interdisciplinary conference and workshop on The Future of Holocaust Testimonies to be held on 11–13 March 2019 in Akko, Israel.  

Steven Spielberg, founder of USC Shoah Foundation and director and co-producer of the film, says there has never been a more important time for students to see the historical period drama. “Hate is less parenthetical today, and it’s more a headline," he told Lester Holt of NBC Nightly News in an interview about the rerelease.

The young Nazi approached 13-year-old Szulem Czygielmamn as he walked on the sidewalk of Lubartowska Street in Lublin, Poland, and shoved him off the sidewalk. Szulem was lucky; Jews had died for less.

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 partners with CNN to share voices of Rohingya refugees.

Jamalida’s interview is among dozens of testimonies documented by USC Shoah Foundation since its arrival in November to the refugee camps in Bangladesh. A total of 11 life-history interviews with Rohingya are being added the Visual History Archive, the world’s largest repository of genocide testimony.

An ITS group has worked since April of 2017 to expand the discoverability of testimonies for students, researchers and anyone else searching for information about specific genocide events.

Although the current situation in Hungary is more complex than many outsiders understand, it’s a tense situation, Ildikó Barna said, and a good time for students to pay more attention to where the slippery slope of hatred can lead – and where it has indeed taken their own country.

Ignited by students’ enthusiasm over IWitness's recent “100 Days to Inspire Respect” initiative, a campaign called #180DaysToInspireRespect has students at Robert Adams Middle School in Massachusetts volunteering each day to present about the respectful acts they’ve witnessed, received, read and heard about.

Despite the testimony of many witnesses to his Nazi-era crimes, Walther Becker walked out of a German courtroom a free man. The judge in the case – who was later revealed to have his own Nazi sympathies – gave little credence to survivor testimony when he handed down his 1972 verdict.

Holocaust survivor Gena Turgel was known in the British press as the “Bride of Belsen” for marrying a British liberator of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she was a prisoner. She gave her testimony to USC Shoah Foundation in 1998.

All this week, 25 middle and high school students from across the United States will be at USC Shoah Foundation to gain a deeper understanding of the causes and impacts of injustice and to learn about becoming active participants in civil society.

Niemand, who was raised in the small town of Linz in Austria, became interested in Holocaust history through the teachings of his mother, a professor of modern history at a local university.

Mireille Knoll managed to survive the Nazis during the Holocaust, but antisemitism is ancient and tenacious, and its tentacles finally caught up with her last week at her home in Paris. The 85-year-old Knoll was stabbed 11 times and burned after attackers – a neighbor and a homeless man – tried to set her apartment ablaze. The men, both in their 20s, were later arrested for a crime that is being investigated as an antisemitic attack. “She’s a Jew, she must have money,” said one attacker to the other, according to Gérard Collomb, the interior minister of France.

BY STEPHEN SMITH. Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, a survivor of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi death camp in Poland, is the first person I have spoken to since the mass shooting which left eleven dead at the Tree of Life synagogue. She does not waste time greeting me in the doorway of her home in London. “So what are we going to do Stephen? We are not making progress!”

A love of old movies drew Shiraz Bhathena into the moving image archive field. As an archivist and post-production specialist at USC Shoah Foundation, he supervised the process of restoring the Institute's testimonies with video and audio problems. The herculean task is finally complete.

Thanks to a new partnership between the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research and the Fortunoff Video Archive at Yale University, researchers at both institutions can now access each other's extensive Holocaust archives. Under the agreement, Yale University is now one of 95 access sites worldwide where the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive is available. Yale University is the only institution in Connecticut where the interviews of the USC Shoah Foundation's Archive are accessible in their entirety.