Join USC Shoah Foundation Finci-Viterbi Executive Director Stephen D. Smith and special guests for a webinar to learn more about tracing family history through Ancestry® and JewishGen.org as they unlock the power of testimony metadata.

In this webinar, the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research team will provide a deep dive into the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, including its history; methodologies of testimony collection, preservation, and indexing; current state of the archive and its collections; and how to use its search engines and interface for research and teaching. The participants will learn how to unlock the research potential of the archive and be able to ask questions and get assistance with effectively searching the archive.

In this webinar, the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research team will provide a deep dive into the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, including its history; methodologies of testimony collection, preservation, and indexing; current state of the archive and its collections; and how to use its search engines and interface for research and teaching. The participants will learn how to unlock the research potential of the archive and be able to ask questions and get assistance with effectively searching the archive.

Professor Hovannisian presented on the history of his Armenian Genocide Oral History collection, which is today part of the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive. Considering that this collection was created as part of two courses that Professor Hovannisian taught at UCLA over five decades, three of his former students – Salpi Ghazarian, Tamar Mashigian, and Lorna Tourian Miller – also spoke about their experiences of conducting interviews with Armenian genocide survivors.

The ties between Cornell University and USC Shoah Foundation are many, and now, they are permanent: The Cornell University Library has acquired access to the Visual History Archive in perpetuity. Cornell University became the 52nd site to provide full access to the archive on an annual basis in November 2015, and the impact on research and education has been significant. This impact can now continue for generations to come, as the witnesses who gave testimony had hoped.

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. 

The National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR) will feature full access to the public of the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive (VHA) of over 54,000 testimonies. One of the world’s leading Armenian Studies centers, NAASR advances education and scholarship through supporting and connecting scholars globally and providing outstanding programming to the general public.  NAASR plans to conduct outreach with schools, colleges, libraries, and other institutions in order to spread awareness about the availability of the VHA at NAASR’s headquarters.

This lecture offered an examination of pro-state paramilitary violence in the Syrian conflict. It analyzed the emergence and transformation of pro-state paramilitarism in Syria in the context of the uprising and civil war. 

Professor Peter Hayes, world-renowned scholar of the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, will serve as the 2019-2020 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research.

This interactive, 65-minute comedic performance mashes up campaign rallies, church revivals, and solo theater shows to uncover the history of voting, what it means to run for local office, and the impact artists can have on democracy.

Julie Gruenbaum Fax is a content strategist and writer for the USC Shoah Foundation. She was a senior writer and editor at the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles and has co-authored six personal history books. She is currently writing a book about her grandmother’s Holocaust experience.

In 2017, Mr. Feingold recorded a more than 4 hour testimony with USC Shoah Foundation as part of the Last Chance Testimony Collection, enabling Holocaust survivors to share their stories for USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive—before it is too late—where they will exist in perpetuity.

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.   

Founded in 1994 by Steven Spielberg, and housed at USC since 2006, USC Shoah Foundation is the caretaker of the Visual History Archive: 55,000 testimonies of Holocaust and genocide survivors and witnesses that fuels programming around the world to educators, scholars, organizations, and community members. The Visual History Archive contains countless treasured family stories, including members of the Trojan family, and during Trojan Family Weekend, we invite you to experience our work in this virtual event.

Chad Gibbs, a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, has been awarded the 2020-2021 Breslauer, Rutman, and Anderson Research Fellowship at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. He will be in residence at the Center during September 2020 in order to conduct research for his dissertation, entitled “Against that Darkness: Perseverance, Resistance, and Revolt at Treblinka.”

Professor Marion Kaplan, 2018-2019 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, gave the annual Shapiro Scholar public lecture on gender and the Holocaust.

A Holocaust survivor saved by Oskar Schindler who gave testimony to the Visual History Archive, the late Hazzan Moshe Taube z''l went on to become one of the great cantors of his generation. During this retrospective event, hosted by Hazzan Robert Kieval and produced by the Cantors Assembly, we will hear classic recordings and recollections of colleagues and friends.

USC Shoah Foundation has partnered with JewishGen.org, an affiliate of the Museum of Jewish Heritage - A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, to integrate an index of data from nearly 50,000 Jewish Holocaust survivor testimonies found in the Visual History Archive® into the JewishGen Holocaust database.  

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. 

Two promising USC scholars – undergraduate student Lucy Sun and graduate student Rachel Zaretsky -- will share the Beth and Arthur Lev Student Research Fellowship for Summer 2020. The Beth and Arthur Lev Student Research Fellowship provides support for USC students at any academic level and from any discipline to conduct a month of research in residence at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research focusing on testimonies of the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive (VHA) and/or other related USC resources and collections.

Lucy Sun will be a senior in the Fall 2020 semester. She is majoring in History and minoring in Psychology and Law.

Ioanida Costache, the Center’s 2019-2020 Breslauer, Rutman, and Anderson Research Fellow, gave a public lecture about the monthlong research she conducted in the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive during her residency at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. This research is part of her ongoing dissertation project that examines how music helps facilitate the cultivation and transmission of Romani memories of the Holocaust.

As local communities assess and adjust to the needs of the world community—and as many schools shift from in-person to virtual classrooms—IWitness and its standards-aligned resources are ready to help educators and parents support students learning.

  Call for Applications from PhD Candidates   Greenberg Research Fellowship Katz Research Fellowship in Genocide Studies

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