At UNESCO’s Paris headquarters on Jan. 27, USC Shoah Foundation Finci-Viterbi Executive Director Stephen Smith will host a panel discussion following a screening of “Who Will Write Our History,” a documentary by Director Roberta Grossman and Executive Producer Nancy Spielberg that chronicles a covert effort by a group of resistance fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto who amassed an archive of documents that would later shed light on the Nazi atrocities that occurred there.

Dimensions in Testimony highlights “Speaking Memories,” an exhibit by the organization Jewish Culture in Sweden featuring the voices and stories of Holocaust survivors. The Swedish History Museum also launched access to the 55,000 testimonies in the Institute’s Visual History Archive.

“Who Will Write Our History” tells how ghetto inhabitant Emanuel Ringelblum, a historian, spearheaded an effort to collect what became one of the most important caches of eyewitness accounts to survive World War II. USC Shoah Foundation is a screening-event partner.

Professor Marion Kaplan, world-renowned scholar of German-Jewish history, will serve as the 2018-2019 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research after being awarded its most esteemed fellowship. Professor Kaplan will deliver a public lecture and spend one week in residence at the Center this Spring.

Holocaust survivor Minna Aspler -- who spent time in the Warsaw Ghetto -- recalls the personality of Emanuel Ringelblum, who had been her history teacher. Ringelblum went on to lead a clandestine effort with other Warsaw Ghetto inhabitants to amass an archive that would eventually shine a light on the atrocities that occurred there. Aspler's testimony, recorded by McGill University in Montreal in 1995, is stored in USC Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive.

Public lecture by Gabór Tóth (University of Oxford, History) 2018-2019 Center Postdoctoral Research Fellow

USC Shoah Foundation is joining forces with The Genocide Education Project, which is dedicated to bringing curriculum about the World War I-era Armenian Genocide into high schools across the United States.

Visit this page to watch the live-streamed event:

Dorothy Zoltek, a Warsaw Ghetto and Holocaust survivor, said she knew Emanuel Ringelblum's family well. She discusses their relationship in this testimony, recorded in 1985 by the Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre in Toronto. The testimony is stored in USC Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive.  

Amy B. Bloom, JD is a social studies/history educational consultant for Oakland Schools, a regional education service agency supporting 28 school districts in Oakland County, Michigan. She also serves as the Chair of the Executive Board for the Center for the Study of Citizenship at Wayne State University.

The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research invites research proposals from USC undergraduate students and USC graduate students for its 2019 Beth and Arthur Lev Student Research Fellowship.

Public lecture by Virginia Bullington (USC undergraduate, Narrative Studies)

New video challenge inspires students and educators to fight against discrimination, injustice and hate by using the power of testimony to create a brighter future.

In her research of testimonies, USC student Virginia Bullington observed that women in the context of both the Armenian and Tutsi Rwanda genocides are often described as “bearers of culture, maternity and nationalism,” while in the Guatemalan context, “indigenous women were not essentialized -- they were erased.”

The controversial standoff between a tribal elder and a high school student that went viral has captivated the media and those on all sides of the political aisle. While all the details are still being uncovered, what strikes me is the climate that permeates our nation. We have devolved to a state of “othering” our countrymen, without reflecting on how our own actions may affect one another. We have stopped seeking to understand one another and instead just attack, sometimes even when the facts are not clear. 

“The Stories We Tell: Narratives of Sexual Violence and Concepts of Gender in Post-Genocide Societies” Virginia Bullington (USC undergraduate, Narrative Studies) 2018 Beth and Arthur Lev Student Research Fellow January 23, 2019

Coinciding with the 25th anniversary and recent rerelease of “Schindler’s List,” USC Shoah Foundation has produced a suite of learning activities connected to the film. The engaging activities encourage critical thinking; all feature clips of testimony from Holocaust survivors who were saved by Oskar Schindler.

Bill Morgan, now 93 years old, is a survivor of the Stanislawow Ghetto. After obtaining a birth certificate from a Polish Christian, he escaped the ghetto and found work as a farmhand in Ukraine. Museum audiences will be able to ask questions of Morgan about his life experiences and hear his pre-recorded responses in real time.