USC Shoah Foundation is saddened by the recent loss of Walter P. Loebenberg, a friend of the Institute and a Holocaust survivor who, after finding refuge in the United States, went on to open the Florida Holocaust Museum, one of the largest Holocaust museums in the nation. He was 94.

Karen Jungblut, USC Shoah Foundation’s director of global initiatives, will join a panel of genocide scholars on Friday — the first day of a two-day conference at Columbia University in New York City about the genocidal violence against the Rohingya in Myanmar.

Holocaust survivor Blake Schiff discusses the direct involvement he and his sisters had as “chroniclers” who helped Emanuel Ringelblum document the atrocities in the Warsaw Ghetto.

USC Shoah Foundation Director of Strategy, Partnership and Media Andi Gitow will join a panel discussion and show selected clips of the film, Who Will Write Our History, at 6 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 7, at the Paley Center for Media in Los Angeles. Joining Gitow will be writer, director and producer Roberta Grossman; Executive Producer Nancy Spielberg; and Holocaust survivor Natalie Gold.

My life and my work at USC Shoah Foundation are strongly connected to the joys and the sorrows of the Armenian community. Thus, I was both shocked and heartened by recent separate events that demonstrated how far we’ve come in advancing human dignity and how far we still have to go.

Sedda Antekelian is USC Shoah Foundation’s Education and Outreach Specialist, Armenian Genocide. She is a fourth-generation survivor of the genocide.

Alberto Innocenti, grandfather of Francesca Innocenti, secretly hid Jewish people -- including members of his wife’s family -- in his apartment during World War II. For this and other acts of heroism the Catholic Italian was recognized posthumously by Yad Vashem.

We commemorate the students and teachers who were killed on Feb. 14, 2018 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, and we gratefully acknowledge the class of Ivy Schamis, the recipient of USC Shoah Foundation’s inaugural Stronger Than Hate Educator Award.

Steven Schindler is Founder & CEO of Connectivity LLC, an advisory that supports purposeful for-profit businesses and nonprofits with strategic planning, brand and marketing development and fundraising counsel. He is Co-Executive Director of Chamber of Purpose, is an ADL Glass Leadership Institute graduate and was San Diego Co-Chair of the 2017 USHMM 2nd Generation Mission.

On January 25, 2019, the fifth- and sixth-graders of a school in Cottbus, Germany honored all those affected during the Holocaust by unveiling a Butterfly Project memorial to the 1.5 million children murdered during this dark moment in history. This first-ever initiative in Germany introduced a new, younger audience to real stories of local children.

As a teacher at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, who survived the tragedy on Feb. 14, 2018, I have spent the past year grappling with this question.

Ivy Schamis is a Social Studies teacher from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL.

A public lecture by Professor Sven Reichardt (University of Konstanz, Germany) Organized by the USC Max Kade Institute and co-sponsored by the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research

A public lecture by Richard G. Hovannisian (Professor Emeritus, UCLA) with commentary by Lorna Touryan Miller, Tamar Mashigian, and Salpi Ghazarian Co-sponsored by the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research and the USC Dornsife Institute of Armenian Studies

USC Shoah Foundation Executive Director Stephen Smith will join a panel at the South by Southwest Conference in Austin about immersive learning. Called “Immersive Learning: No Frames, No Walls, No Limit,” the panel will discuss and explore the future of learning and cultural engagement in a world where the physical and visual arts, and the full range of formal and informal learning, no longer need to be seen or framed in traditional spaces, places and media formats.

In this lecture, Lukas Meissel (PhD candidate, Haifa University, and 2018-2019 Greenberg Research Fellow) presents the preliminary findings of his dissertation research about photographic practices in concentration camps, specifically photos taken by SS men, to argue that the SS photographs were used to create a specific visual narrative of the concentration camps that excludes significant aspects of the camps’ reality.

The story of Leon Bass, who took part in the liberation of Nazi concentration camps only to later face discrimination in the United States, inspires a group of dormitory RAs at the Massachusetts campus to share their own experiences of feeling excluded.

  “SS-Photographs from Concentration Camps. Perpetrator Sources and Counter-Narratives” Lukas Meissel (Ph.D. Candidate in Holocaust Studies, University of Haifa) 2018-2019 Margee and Douglas Greenberg Research Fellow February 12, 2019  

Instead of factories of death, these black-and-white stills convey the idea that soldiers are happy and prisoners are mere criminals serving a sentence. A research fellow with USC Shoah Foundation’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research discussed his findings on this topic in a lecture.