RSVP Today! Get to know USC Shoah Foundation in this brief introductory webinar! Participants will have an opportunity to:

USC Shoah Foundation welcomed staff from the educational program at Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum (ABSM) in Oświęcim, Poland, to its Los Angeles headquarters for a week-long collaboration.

USC Shoah Foundation announced a new partnership with Ancestry® to provide free access to searchable data from nearly 50,000 Jewish Holocaust survivor testimonies that are in the Visual History Archive® (VHA). “We are grateful that Ancestry is providing access to this initial set of metadata and enhancing the discoverability of our archive and this critically important history,” said Stephen Smith, Finci-Viterbi Executive Director at USC Shoah Foundation. Here’s how it works:

Peter Hayes is Professor Emeritus of History and German and Theodore Zev Weiss Holocaust Educational Foundation Professor Emeritus of Holocaust Studies at Northwestern University and a former chair of the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Among his thirteen books are The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies (co-edited with John K. Roth), How Was It Possible? A Holocaust Reader, and Why? Explaining the Holocaust, which also has appeared in German and Spanish translations and shortly will be in Chinese, Polish, and Slovak, as well.

Pictured: Holocaust survivor Elly Gotz who gave his testimony to the Azrieli Foundation in 2018. His interview is one of 31 new testimonies from the Azrieli Foundation that have been indexed and catalogued in the Visual History Archive. This week’s semi-annual VHA release adds 128 new testimonies to the 55,000-strong collection. All the updated testimonies are available at 163 access sites worldwide.

Mehmet Polatel is the 2019-2020 Junior Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. He received his Ph.D. degree from Bogazici University in Istanbul with his dissertation focusing on the emergence and transformation of the Armenian land question in the late Ottoman Empire. Prior to receiving his Ph.D., he earned a BA in International Relations from the University of Middle East Technical University in 2007, and an MA in Comparative Studies in History and Society from Koç University, Istanbul in 2009.

USC Shoah Foundation has been awarded the nation’s prestigious distinguished building award – The American Architecture Award® for 2020 – for its new global headquarters at the University of Southern California.

Florian Zabranksy, a PhD candidate at the Centre for German-Jewish Studies at the University of Sussex, United Kingdom, has been awarded the 2020-2021 Margee and Douglas Greenberg Research Fellowship at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. He will be in residence at the Center in Spring 2021 in order to conduct research for his dissertation, which examines male Jewish intimacy during the Holocaust.

During my dissertation research on the history of fear in the Weimar Republic, 1919-1933, a Corrie ten Boom fellowship provided the opportunity for me to visit the USC Shoah Foundation to explore the visual testimonies of the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive. When I arrived, I was not exactly sure how I might make use of these incredibly important digitized collections in my project.

For 25 years, USC Shoah Foundation has given voice to survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides with the goal of educating people around the world, and inspiring action. The 55,000 women and men in its Visual History Archive® share their life stories — of trauma and loss, as well as culture and family, and ultimately survival. Representing more than a century of history, these testimonies provide an enduring legacy of memory. As long as there are still witnesses ready to speak, their voices must be heard.

  “Continuity, Escalation, and Local Actors: The Hamidian Massacres and the Armenian Genocide” Mehmet Polatel 2019-2020 Center Junior Postdoctoral Research Fellow April 13, 2020

Visit the Visual History Archive

Russell A. Spinney is an independent historian and instructor at the Thacher School in Ojai, California.

Start Time: 8:00 am PDT/11:00 am EDT/4:00 pm GMT End Time: 9:30 am PDT/12:30 pm EDT/5:30 pm GMT   

In this talk, Ioanida Costache (PhD candidate, Stanford University) problematizes the staggering silence and forgetting surrounding Romani persecution during the Holocaust, a history that has been muted or distorted for decades.

Lauren Cantillon, a PhD candidate in the Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King’s College, London, has been awarded the 2020-2021 Robert J. Katz Research Fellowship in Genocide Studies at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. She will be in residence at the Center in Spring 2021 in order to conduct research for her dissertation, entitled “Remembering and Remediating Women’s Stories of Sexual Violence during the Holocaust.”

Only a day after the University of Southern California announced that it would conduct a three-day test to move all classes online, which soon turned into a permanent arrangement until the end of Spring semester, my colleague and I gave our last in-person introduction to the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive to a USC class. Perhaps serendipitously, one of the topics discussed in this class was physical health.

Daryn Eller manages the Institute’s institutional media collection and participates in cataloging the Visual History Archive testimonies. She previously worked as a magazine and book writer, has an undergraduate degree from UC Berkeley, and a masters in library and information science from San Jose State University.

In this lecture, Gabór Tóth discussed the ways text and data mining technology has helped to recover fragments of lost experiences of Nazi persecution out of oral history interviews with survivors. He also demonstrated how a data-driven anthology of these fragments has been built.

Malmö Museums invites you to the grand opening of Speaking Memories — The Last Witnesses of the Holocaust on June 11, 2020 at 6:00 PM GMT+2 (9:00 AM PDT) at Slottsholmen, Malmö Museums Participants include:

Chad Gibbs is a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research and teaching interests extend from Holocaust studies to modern European Jewish history, modern Germany, memory, oral history, gender, and antisemitism. Chad’s dissertation, “Against that Darkness: Perseverance, Resistance, and Revolt at Treblinka,” investigates the spatial and social networks of Jewish resistance inside this extermination camp.

Join us for a virtual commemoration and lecture featuring a keynote address from USC Professor of History Wolf Gruner, the Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies and Founding Director of the Center for Advanced Genocide Research at USC Shoah Foundation. Register Now

“You can’t just close your eyes and pretend that the history goes away,” says Mickey Shapiro the eldest son of two Holocaust survivors who just finished a four-year-long journey to create a film about his mother’s story. “I am stuck with this for life, but I think it makes me more motivated. When you hear a story like that from your parents, you want to make things better.”

75 years after the end of WWII, please join Finci-Viterbi Executive Director Stephen D. Smith as he discusses concepts of home with Holocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter. On Yom Hashoah, as the world gathers virtually to remember the loss of 6 million lives during the Holocaust, our conversation will explore the values of family, community and home in our world today and the ways that testimony contributes to these. 

USC Shoah Foundation mourns the loss of Luke Holland who passed away this week, a transformative figure in the field of historical documentation and a dear friend of the Institute. “Luke guided us all to face our pasts—to face our fears—as pathway to living a more informed, peaceful life,” said Stephen Smith, Finci-Viterbi Executive Director of USC Shoah Foundation.

10AM – 11AM PDT | 1PM - 2PM EDT Internationally acclaimed scholar and historian, Professor Yehuda Bauer, joins the Echoes & Reflections community from Israel for a special presentation on the Holocaust and other genocides. While the Holocaust is a unique historical event, the study of this history can inform the study of other mass atrocities. During this webinar, Professor Bauer will talk about similarities and differences between the Holocaust and other genocides, and what can be learned and applied from a study of the Holocaust to a study of other genocides.

In commemoration of Pride Month, the Institute recognizes the LGBTQ+ people persecuted under the Nazis from as early as 1933 to the end of the war in 1945, some of whose stories are in the Institute’s Visual History Archive.They are stories of survival, resistance, rescue, and heartbreaking loss. Some of the witnesses were targeted by the Nazis for being gay under the German penal code, Paragraph 175. Other witnesses recall their encounters with gay men and women who provided rescue and aid at great risk to their own lives.

The Anne Bernard Interviewer Collection comprises more than 250 hours of survivor testimony. “It is ennobling to be in their presence,” reflected Anne. I’ve thought about all those interviews and how they truly changed my life. And how they touched me, each one of them, in so many ways. I was, and still am, grateful to the Shoah Foundation for giving me one of the most meaningful experiences of my life.”

“Locating Women in the Revolt: Gender and Spaces of Resistance at Treblinka” Chad Gibbs (PhD Candidate in History, University of Wisconsin at Madison) 2020-2021 Breslauer, Rutman, and Anderson Research Fellow September 29, 2020

This week, we pay tribute to the life and work of Ilia Salita, a key partner and friend to the Institute of many years.