The top stories of 2017 including media coverage of the Institute's work throughout the year.

Even absent this current era of “alternative facts” and “fake news,” the new Polish law making it a crime to point out Poland’s complicity in the Holocaust would be alarming. 

But that it is occurring in today’s climate of demagoguery, heightened nationalism and ethnic tension – an unholy trio that threatens to metastasize on a global scale – is a troubling development.

Poland’s effort has come under attack by Israel and stewards of Holocaust memory.

The event hosted by USC Shoah Foundation’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research appears to have been the only international academic conference to mark the 80th anniversary of this fateful event of November 1938, during which Nazis and ordinary Germans murdered more than 100 Jews and destroyed thousands of synagogues, Jewish institutions, stores and homes across Germany.

“The Last Goodbye,” a virtual-reality film that brings the viewer inside a Nazi concentration camp with Holocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter, won a top prize at the 2018 Lumiere Awards hosted Monday by The Advanced Imaging Society.

The film was honored with the Creative Arts Award, VR – Documentary Jury Prize, at the awards ceremony held at the Warner Bros. Studio in Hollywood.

A newly published article in the peer-reviewed journal Social Education focuses on the potential of virtual reality in the classroom, and highlights USC Shoah Foundation’s virtual reality film 'Lala.' The 6-minute film centers on Holocaust survivor Roman Kent, who shares the story of his time in Nazi-occupied Poland alongside his beloved dog Lala.
Although the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive is typically thought of as a way to preserve the stories of people who survived the Holocaust, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania has found a way to use the Archive to broaden the scope of memory to include not only survivors but also people who perished.
My father was born and raised in Sighet, Romania, just down the road from the Elie Wiesel's simple blue childhood home. When the Nobel laureate's house was spray-painted with antisemitic slurs this summer, it felt like an attack on my own familial history.
“New Perspectives on Kristallnacht: After 80 Years, the Nazi Pogrom in Global Comparison” was an international conference held at USC. Organized by the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research and the USC Casden Institute, the conference convened 22 scholars from all over the world — the United States, Germany, Israel, the United Kingdom, and Canada.
To mark the 75th anniversary of the revolt, USC Shoah Foundation is sharing the story of the recently departed Sol Liber. One of the last living fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising until his passing last month, Liber was also among USC Shoah Foundation’s first interviewees.