The USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research and USC Shoah Foundation present the Annual Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar Lecture by Dan Stone (Professor of Modern History and Director of the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, University of London), 2023-2024 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence. Join us in person for this lecture or attend virtually on Zoom.

Thursday, February 1, 2024 at 1:00 PM PT | 4:00 PM ET

One morning in 1978, Theary Seng awoke alongside her younger brother in their prison cell in Boeng Rai Security Center, about 100 kilometers south of their hometown of Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The children’s mother had been in the cell the night before, but now she was gone.

Join us on April 11 as Tabarovsky presents her research on how Soviet anti-Zionist disinformation campaigns and propaganda are being reproduced by today’s young American progressives and how understanding the history can help us rethink strategies to counter contemporary antisemitism and anti-Zionism.

Will Horowitz provides external relations for the USC Shoah Foundation. Will received his bachelor’s degree in political science and his master’s degree in public administration and policy from American University. He previously worked at the Government Accountability Office, Amgen, and the American Civil Liberties Union’s Washington Legislative Office before starting at USC Shoah Foundation in 2023.

Thursday, February 22, 2024 at 1:00 PM PT | 4:00 PM ET

At the close of World War II, the Allies labeled survivors of the Holocaust as either displaced persons (DPs), refugees, or stateless persons. These categories included Jews, prisoners of war, Roma and Sinti, forced laborers, and perpetrators who used the chaos to hide their identity. But as the scale of the humanitarian disaster became more apparent, the Allies were forced to refine these designations. Christina Wirth, the USC Shoah Foundation's inaugural Robert J. Katz Fellow in Antisemitism Studies, explores postwar sorting processes and the roles officials and humanitarian organizations played in shaping these categories. She further examines how antisemitism contributed to the establishment of a "Jewish DP" subcategory.

In the aftermath of the October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks in southern Israel, the USC Shoah Foundation and Tablet Studios announced a partnership to collect, archive, and make available testimonies of survivors, bereaved family members, and rescuers who risked their lives to save others during the assault.

In partnership with organizations in the United States and Israel, the USC Shoah Foundation began collecting testimony from survivors of the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, just weeks after they occurred. These testimonies will be preserved and made available to the public as part of the Visual History Archive’s Countering Antisemitism Through Testimony Collection, which documents antisemitism after 1945.

With anti-Jewish rhetoric and violence on the rise around the world, the USC Shoah Foundation this fall launches the Daniel and Marisa Klass USC Shoah Foundation Lecture Series, focusing this year on Antisemitism where leading scholars will guide audiences through the latest research and explore a diversity of approaches to understanding and combating the current upsurge.

In 2018, USC Shoah Foundation launched an initiative to address requests from survivors who, for complex and often very personal reasons, could not come forward in the 1990s. Since the start of COVID, the foundation has received more than 400 requests from survivors to record their testimonies. We believe there are thousands more who want to tell their stories. 

April 7 is the International Day of Reflection on the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda. The day of remembrance marks the start of the 100-day genocidal campaign in which an estimated 800,000 Rwandans—mainly Tutsis and moderate Hutus—were killed by well-organized mobs of Hutu extremists. Edith Umugiraneza, a survivor of the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda who now works for USC Shoah Foundation, says false information and manipulated facts helped ignite and sustain the violence, and even today threaten to distort our understanding of events.

The USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of Damas Gisimba, the director of a Kigali orphanage who sheltered and saved the lives of over 400 people, mostly children, during the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. Later in life, he headed the Gisimba Memorial Center, a charitable organization that provided after-school programs for disadvantaged children and served as a place of remembrance for victims of the genocide.

Ari Şekeryan received his PhD from the University of Oxford in 2018 and has since held research positions at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, California State University–Fresno, the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, and the University of Cambridge.