Aspen Film in partnership with USC Shoah Foundation is proud to present a special family event featuring two short films: The Tattooed Torah and Ruth: A Little Girl's Big Journey. Free to the public.

Join us on January 18 as we take a deep dive into USC ShoahFoundation’s Visual History Archive, which is home to nearly 55,000 testimonies from survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust.

On this Martin Luther King Jr. day, we reflect on Dr. King’s legacy, and the work that remains to be done. However long the arc of history, we continue to bend it towards justice.

Hosted by USC President Carol Folt and USC Shoah Foundation's new Finci-Viterbi Executive Director Dr. Robert Williams, this discussion and live demo event will feature: a panel discussion moderated by USC Shoah Foundation's Dr. Kori Street.

Following remarks by USC President Carol Folt and Finci-Viterbi Executive Director Dr. Robert Williams, this discussion and live demo event feature a panel discussion moderated by USC Shoah Foundation's Dr. Kori Street, demonstration of the new features, and opportunities to ask questions and learn from testimony. The VHA redesign, part of the Lee Liberman Visual History Archive Program was made possible thanks to the generous support of the Lee Liberman Foundation, Koret Foundation, Crown Family Philanthropies and others.

Rena Quint has worked hard to find a balance between moving beyond memory and living inside of it, between yearning to know—and have proof of—where she came from and what she lost, but of not wanting to be defined by it.

Jenna Leventhal is the Senior Director of Administration at USC Shoah Foundation. She earned a BA in history from UC Santa Barbara and an MA in public history from University of Houston, with an emphasis in Holocaust education and oral history.

Pardy Minassian’s childhood in Syria was suffused with sounds from Armenia, the result of her father’s collection of more than 500 audio and video interviews he conducted over the years with Armenian Genocide survivors. When Pardy and her family left Syria for Armenia in 2012, the then 18-year-old student focused on a range of different Armenian sounds, earning a bachelor’s degree in Music Composition and a master's degree in Guitar Performance from the Yerevan State Komitas Conservatory. 

Annabel Carballo-Mesa is a PhD candidate at the University of Barcelona. Since January 17 she has been in Los Angeles conducting research with Visual History Archive (VHA) testimonies for a dissertation provisionally entitled “Na Bister! (Don’t Forget!) An Oral History of the Roma and Sinti Genocide”.

A powerful documentary that hinges on USC Shoah Foundation testimony raises difficult questions about how Hungary memorializes victims of the Nazi occupation and confronts its own role in wartime atrocities. Released last year, filmmaker Dániel Ács’ Monument to the Murderers recounts the controversy surrounding a monument erected in Budapest in 2005 to honor local victims of World War II.

A University of California linguist has been awarded a $470,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to analyze Yiddish-language testimonies contained in USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive.

Fifteen hours of interviews describing the actions of a group of World War II-era diplomats who defied official policies to save tens of thousands of lives during the Holocaust have been added to USC Shoah Foundation’s 55,000-strong Visual History Archive (VHA) thanks to a collaboration with the Andrew J. & Joyce D. Mandell Family Foundation.

Join us for this in-person event at the Institute for Armenian Studies on oral history and its implications. Organized in conjunction with the USC Dornsife Institute for Armenian Studies, the day will offer two panel discussions on the evolving place and role of oral history in the field of Armenian Studies.

USC President Carol L. Folt and scholars from USC and beyond gathered at the global headquarters of USC Shoah Foundation on November 11 for the public launch of the redesigned Visual History Archive, the world’s largest collection of primary source video testimonies from survivors of the Holocaust and other genocides. 

A pilot collection of 20 testimonies of survivors and witnesses of the 1995 genocide that took place in Srebrenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina has been added to USC Shoah Foundation’s 55,000-strong Visual History Archive (VHA) thanks to a new collaboration with the Srebrenica Memorial Center. 

Trained as a historian of modern Europe in USC’s History Department, Clark comes to the Shoah Foundation from MIT, where she has been the Faculty Director of MIT’s Programs in the Digital Humanities.

At USC for Trojan Family Weekend? Come visit us at Leavey Library! Search the 55,000 testimonies in our Visual History Archive with the help of trained staff. Find out about student internship opportunities.

Join the Maimonides Institute for Medicine, Ethics and the Holocaust and the USC Shoah Foundation - The Institute for Visual History and Education as we commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day with the official launch of the Project on Bioethics and the Holocaust: Using Testimony in Medical and Health Professions Education.

Robert Widerman Clary was among the first 100 Holocaust survivors interviewed for USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, and he conducted 75 interviews of other survivors. In his testimony, he talks about his instinct and talent for entertaining—honed while he was a child in Paris—saved and shaped his life.

Charlotte Kiechel, a Ph.D. candidate in Global History at Yale University, has been awarded the 2021-2022 USC Shoah Foundation Robert J. Katz Research Fellowship in Genocide Studies. She will be in residence at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research in Spring 2022 to conduct research related to her dissertation, which is entitled “The Politics of Comparison: Holocaust Memory and Visions of ‘Third World’ Suffering, 1950-1995.”

Ryan Cheuk Him Sun, a PhD candidate in History at the University of British Columbia, Canada, has been awarded the 2022-2023 Breslauer, Rutman, and Anderson Research Fellowship at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research. He will be in residence at the Center for a month during the Spring 2023 semester.

“Why the Jews?” Join us for another exploration of this question in the second event of USC Shoah Foundation’s Scholar Lab on Antisemitism event series. This moderated discussion will feature Dr. Jonathan Judaken of Rhodes College and Dr. Jeffrey Veidlinger of the University of Michigan, both the members of the Scholar Lab on Antisemitism program. As part of the discussion, Dr. Judaken and Dr.

A public lecture by Sina Fabian (Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany, History) USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research Visiting Scholar (Join us in person for this lecture or attend virtually on Zoom) Organized by the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research

As the world watches in horror as millions of Ukrainians resist, take shelter or flee from Russian attacks, news reports stir up connections to a haunting past. We scanned our Visual History Archive to bring just a few stories from these places to light. The words of survivors, as they often do, reach forward through time.

Raíssa Alonso, a PhD candidate in Social History at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, has been awarded the 2022-2023 Margee and Douglas Greenberg Research Fellowship at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research. She will be in residence at the Center in March 2023 to conduct research for her dissertation, “The ‘Other Germany’ in Brazil and the United States: Intellectuals in Exile and the Fight Against Nazism (1933-1959).”

Carli Snyder, a PhD candidate in History at the City University of New York (CUNY), has been awarded the 2022-2023 USC Shoah Foundation USC Shoah Foundation Robert J. Katz Research Fellowship in Genocide Studies. She will be in residence at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research in January 2023 to conduct research for her dissertation “‘The Flesh of the Facts’”: Toward a Feminist Holocaust Consciousness."

Lilia Tomchuk, a PhD candidate at the Fritz Bauer Institute at Goethe University Frankfurt, has been awarded the 2021-2022 Margee and Douglas Greenberg Research Fellowship at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research. She will be in residence at the Center in Spring 2022 in order to conduct research for her dissertation, which is entitled “Dimensions of Jewish Women's Experiences During the Holocaust in Occupied Ukraine.”

It was not easy for the more than 52,000 Holocaust survivors and witnesses in our Visual History Archive to tell their stories. But they did it, because they understood the importance of preserving these painful memories for future generations. We are those future generations, and it is our turn to carry their stories and messages of strength and resilience forward.

When Lee Liberman first viewed testimonies from USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive (VHA) almost 25 years ago, she was immediately moved to action. “We have a commitment and duty to humanity to combat hate, and we must work diligently to bring these testimonies to communities around the globe,” she said. More than two decades later, as Lee transitions to an emeritus role after a successful term as Chair of the Institute’s Board of Councilors, she has more than delivered on her pledge.

In the wake of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsis in Rwanda, government officials, memory workers, and human rights activists have all deployed a litany of Holocaust references — from discussions of “Never Again” to allusions to Primo Levi’s “grey zone.” Drawing upon research conducted with testimonies from the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, Charlotte Kiechel (Visiting Assistant Professor, Williams College) will illuminate the global uses of Holocaust memory by examining Rwandan governmental forces use of Holocaust references.