The USC Shoah Foundation and Living Links have named Mollie Bowman Managing Director of Living Links, the first national organization created to engage and empower third-generation (3G) descendants of Holocaust survivors.

An estimated 1 million grandchildren of Holocaust survivors live in the United States. At a time when the number of Holocaust survivors is dwindling and antisemitism is on the rise, 3Gs are uniquely qualified to offer personal accounts about how unchecked hate led to the Holocaust.

For years, Celina Biniaz, one of the youngest people saved by Oskar Schindler, did not tell anyone – not even her children – that she was a Holocaust survivor. She feared no one could comprehend what she had been through, and she didn’t want to impose the trauma of her childhood upon her son and daughter.

Celina’s reluctance to speak ended in 1994. That year, director Steven Spielberg brought Oskar Schindler’s story to the screen with Schindler’s List. He established Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, which later became the USC Shoah Foundation.

Johanna Lehr holds a doctorate in political science from the University of Paris 1 Sorbonne, a professional master's degree in adult psychopathology from the University of Paris 7 and a law degree from the University of Strasbourg. Dr. Lehr has received post-doctoral fellowships from the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah and the Fondation du Judaïsme Français in Paris. She has also worked for Yahad-In Unum, a French organization that raises awareness of the sites of mass executions of Jews and Roma by Nazi extermination units in Eastern Europe during the Second World War.

The USC Shoah Foundation has named two key members to its senior leadership team, Senior Director of Programs Catherine E. Clark and Director of Administration Jenna Leventhal. The appointments represent a pivotal restructuring under the leadership of Finci-Viterbi Executive Director Robert J. Williams as the organization marks its 30th anniversary amid a global rise in antisemitism.

The USC Shoah Foundation mourns the loss of Dr. Ruth K. Westheimer, a Holocaust survivor who fled Nazi Germany without her parents at the age of 10 and went on to become a renowned and beloved sex therapist and media personality. She was 96 years old. 

Yehuda Bauer (z”l) was much more than his many well-deserved titles, including (but not limited to) Professor Emeritus of History and Holocaust Studies at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Academic Advisor to Yad Vashem, and Honorary Chair of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. He was also a friend and mentor.

On January 23, 2002, Ruth Pearl dreamt that her son, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, was scared and in trouble. In her dream, she told him she would bring him tea and take care of him. She woke up in a panic and sent an email to Daniel, who was on assignment in Karachi, Pakistan.

“I said, ‘Danny, this is a dream that I had. Please humor me and answer this email immediately.’ He never did,” Ruth said in an interview with the USC Shoah Foundation in 2014.

In a five-hour interview with the USC Shoah Foundation, Justus Rosenberg refers to himself as a “small fry,” “a cog,” an unimportant person. And perhaps it was for this reason that for decades, the Bard College literature professor hadn’t let on—to his colleagues, to his students, and even, for a time, to his wife—that he had fought and outwitted the Nazis during World War II to save thousands from persecution.

Professor Dan Stone, a renowned historian of the Holocaust, will serve as the 2023-2024 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research and USC Shoah Foundation. He will spend a week in residence at the Center and USC Shoah Foundation in April and deliver the Annual Sara and Asa Shapiro Lecture entitled “The Holocaust: An Unfinished History” on April 8, 2024.

Pavlo Khudish is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Archaeology, Ethnology and Cultural Studies, Faculty of History and International Relations, Uzhhorod National University, Ukraine. In 2016, Pavlo defended his dissertation at Uzhhorod University on Czechoslovak-Soviet relations in postwar Transcarpathia. He specializes in Holocaust studies, the modern history of Central and Eastern Europe, and Jewish history in the Carpathian region.