On October 21, 2020, at 9:00 AM EDT, join Echoes & Reflections Director Ariel Behrman as she discusses how her team responded to the needs and concerns of teachers faced with suddenly having to teach the history of the Holocaust in a virtual classroom as schools closed in the wake of COVID-19, by developing and extending their pedagogy, teaching strategies and tools to support teaching about the Holocaust in the context of COVID-19.

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.

In this clip from her testimony, Itka Zygmuntowicz reads one of her poems to illustrate the danger of being a bystander.

We are very saddened at the USC Shoah Foundation to learn that our friend and Holocaust survivor Itka Zygmuntowicz passed away October 9, 2020, at the age of 94.

On Indigenous Peoples’ Day, October 12, 2020, three members of the organizing committee discussed goals and plans for the international conference “Mass Violence and Its Lasting Impact on Indigenous Peoples - The Case of the Americas and Australia/Pacific Region.” The conference, postponed until October 2021 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, will convene Indigenous and non-Indigenous knowledge holders and scholars from around the world at the University of Southern California, which sits on the traditional land of the Tongva/Gabrieliño People.

When Maryam, a hardworking young doctor in a small-town clinic, is prevented from flying to Dubai for a conference without a male guardian’s approval, she seeks help from a politically connected cousin but inadvertently registers as a candidate for the municipal council. Maryam sees the election as a way to fix the muddy road in front of her clinic, but her campaign slowly garners broader appeal.

This past May, a friend sent me an article he knew I would appreciate. It was an opinion piece in the New York Times titled “Burying My Bubby During the Pandemic” written by a comedy writer named Eitan Levine who, like me, grew up with a grandmother who survived the Holocaust. I began to read and found myself immediately wrapped inside his writing which was so honest it was cathartic. I immediately reached out to Eitan and asked if his grandmother’s testimony was in USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive.

Twenty-five years ago, in October, 1995, a then 72 year-old Fanny Starr sat down in her living room in Denver, Colorado and recorded a two-hour long testimony with USC Shoah Foundation. Fanny was born as Fala Granek in 1922 in Lodz, Poland -- a diverse city where Jewish and Polish students intermingled. Her family was modern yet traditional. They spoke Polish, kept kosher, went to public school, and celebrated the Jewish holidays; she and her four siblings were assimilated in the way that many young Jewish people in the United States are today.

Classrooms Without Borders, in partnership with Liberation75, Rodef Shalom Congregation, and Film Pittsburgh, is excited to offer the opportunity to watch the film "Prosecuting Evil: The Extraordinary World of Ben Ferencz" and engage in a post-film discussion with the film director, Barry Avrich; former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues, David Scheffer; Executive Director of the USC Shoah Foundation, Dr. Stephen Smith; former Senior Historian at Facing History and Ourselves, Dr.

Over the past five years, USC Shoah Foundation has documented the stories of experts and witnesses to contemporary antisemitism as part of our Countering Antisemitism Through Testimony Program (CATT).  

As Americans head to the polls on Election Day, Alysa Cooper, granddaughter of Holocaust Survivor Gerda Weissmann Klein, is working hard putting her grandmother’s values into practice. Alysa is Executive Director of Citizenship Counts, a non-partisan organization started by Gerda in 2008 to educate middle and high school students on citizenship and encourage them to appreciate their rights and responsibilities as Americans.

Part of a series that will examine genocide and the law, this moderated discussion will explore why eyewitness testimony matters in preventing genocide. USC Shoah Foundation Finci-Viterbi Executive Director Stephen Smith will lead the conversation with witnesses and experts in the field to tackle this urgent challenge from multiple perspectives.

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

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.

My recent stay at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my academic career.  From the remarkable power and content of the Visual History Archive, to the welcoming and helpful nature of the staff and donor community, I leave my term as the Breslauer, Rutman, and Anderson Research Fellow strengthened by new friendships and enriched by new findings for my work. 

USC Shoah Foundation has launched a path-breaking online teaching tool to enable students and educators to ask questions that prompt real-time recorded responses from Holocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter. The tool will be available at no cost through a new activity in the Institute’s flagship educational website, IWitness.

Giving Tuesday was created with a simple idea—a day that encourages people to do good by paying it forward, sharing kindness, spreading love, sparking joy and giving back. Giving Tuesday is a global generosity movement unleashing the power of people and organizations to transform their communities and the world. In these difficult times, we ask that you make a gift to USC Shoah Foundation to stand with us—against prejudice, intolerance and bigotry—as a beacon of light and hope for all of humanity.

On November 24 at 8AM PST/11AM EST, USC Shoah Foundation Finci-Viterbi Executive Director Stephen Smith will moderate a panel of experts convened by UNESCO to launch UNESCO and OSCE's latest publication on antisemitism. Addressing Anti-Semitism in Schools: Training Curricula, a new four volume resource for teacher and school director trainers is UNESCO's second publication dedicated to antisemitism since 2018. The resource and event are designed to engage in meaningful discussions about effective ways to address antisemitism through education.

An online lecture by Badema Pitic, VHA Research Officer, organized by the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music Department of Ethnomusicology

A new FBI report says hate crimes increased dramatically last year by the highest margin since 2008. Antisemitic hate crimes rose by 14 percent with a total of 953 hate crimes recorded against Jews and Jewish institutions. Reported incidents of assault, vandalism and harassment included a white supremacist shooting at a Chabad center in Poway, California, a shooting in Jersey City, New Jersey, and a stabbing in Monsey, New York.

During Florida’s Holocaust Education Week, 12,000 students and educators from school districts across the state experienced a livestreamed theatrical performance and concert with author and virtuoso concert pianist Mona Golabek. A recording of the broadcast can be viewed on Facebook.

We are very saddened to learn of the passing of our dear friend and valued colleague Dr. Sharon Gillerman on November 20, 2020, at the age of 60.   Sharon was a scholar in Jewish history on faculty at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC) and at USC for more than 20 years. Her scholarship focused on modern German and central European Jewish history with a particular interest in gender history, cultural studies, popular culture, and transnational history.   

I never intended to spend months listening to Holocaust testimonies.  My name is Chaya Nove, I am a sociolinguist working on a doctoral dissertation about language change in Yiddish vowels. In my research, I consider the Yiddish spoken by Hasidic Jews in New York today (Hasidic Yiddish, or HY) as a living, changing language, with the understanding that this language was once spoken by a group of people in another time and place. 

Chaya Nove is a PhD candidate in the Linguistics program at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY). Her research interests include sociolinguistics, phonetics, language variation and change, contact linguistics and bilingualism. She is currently working on a project to investigate variation and change in the vowel system of contemporary Hasidic Yiddish spoken in New York. She is also conducting acoustic analyses of European Yiddish using archival recordings. Visit her CUNY website profile here. 

7 December 2020 - 7PM EST/4PM PST/11AM AEDT+1 This program is sponsored by the Goldrich Family Foundation. Join USC Shoah Foundation and the Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival for a special screening of The Tattooed Torah followed by a post-screening Q&A moderated by USC Shoah Foundation Finci-Viterbi Executive Director, Stephen Smith.

Join Stephen Smith as he gives the virtual keynote address at the first annual International Human Rights Day event hosted by ENOUGH (Education Now on Understanding Genocide and Hate) and The Town of New Castle Holocaust and Human Rights Committee. Stephen will share how testimony of Holocaust survivors and other genocide witnesses can help students, scholars, families, and communities make a difference in shaping our world for the better.

Leaders in the field of genocide prevention and human rights activists join together to discuss the definition of ethnic cleansing, in the context of the ongoing conflict in and around Artsakh. This prerecorded panel will air on Facebook Live.