The staff at USC Shoah Foundation is saddened to learn about recent the passing of Asa Shapiro, father of board member Mickey Shapiro and Holocaust survivor.

The need for continued memorialization of the fate of the Roma and Sinti population of Europe has never been more important.

USC Shoah Foundation staff members are in Rwanda this week participating in a colloquium about peace education, hosted by the Institute’s partner in Rwanda, Aegis Trust.

The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research invites research proposals from USC faculty members and graduate students for its Summer 2017 Research Fellowships.

In the collective memory, the February Revolution has faded or been mixed with the October Revolution, which happened eight months later and defined the trajectory of the Russian history for the next 70 years. However, the memory of the February Revolution is preserved in several eyewitness testimonies to the Holocaust in the Visual History Archive.

New Dimensions in Testimony will be exhibited in the Abe & Ida Cooper Survivor Stories Experience, enabling visitors to interact with the project’s filmed testimonies of 13 survivors, including seven who live in the Chicago area.

The 2017-2018 Interdisciplinary Research Week at USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research has come to a close, but for the seven scholars who were awarded this year’s fellowship, the work is just beginning.

The museum staff and students were among the first to see the NDT testimony of Nanjing Massacre survivor Madame Xia Shuqin.

The 27 interviews, recorded January 6-18, 2017, will bring the total number of testimonies in the collection to 103.

On July 30, 1937 the head of Soviet secret police Nikolai Ezhov signed the order that started a mass punitive operation against their own citizens.

Katja Schatte, the 2016-2017 Margee and Douglas Greenberg Research Fellow, gave a public lecture at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research focusing on pre and post-reunification Jewish life in East Berlin from the late 1970s through the early 1990s.

Following the success of two visits by the Holocaust Geographies Collaborative research group to USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, the next recipients of the annual Interdisciplinary Research Week fellowship have been chosen.

For a German like myself, International Holocaust Remembrance Day is a day that is both intensely private and profoundly public.

The foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” (German acronym EVZ) is hosting an international workshop on the use of Holocaust survivor testimonies in education January 9-11.

The 2017 Interdisciplinary Research Week team gave a public lecture to discuss the progress of their project so far, in which they plan to comparatively analyze the individual experiences and narratives of Holocaust survivors in four Latin American countries.

One feature of her research is examining the role of the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive interviews in the construction of social memory of the Holocaust in the Soviet Jewish community and more widely in the post-Soviet society. During her month-long residency at the Center, Rebrova examined some of the USC Shoah Foundation’s institutional records about the selection, training, and methodology of interviewers in Russia.

The ‘Third Workshop for Advanced PhD Candidates from North American Universities and Israel who are working on the Holocaust’, co-sponsored by the USC Shoah Foundation Center For Advanced Genocide Research and Yad Vashem, took place from June 25 to June 29, 2017 at the International Institute for Holocaust Research in Yad Vashem.

USC Shoah Foundation on Monday Mar. 27 and on Friday Mar. 31 celebrated the completion of a years-long endeavor to integrate hundreds of testimonies from the Armenian Genocide into the Visual History Archive.

The Future of Storytelling (FOST) Festival and Summit in Snug Harbor, New York City this week will include a talk by USC Shoah Foundation Chief Technology Officer Sam Gustman as well as exhibits of New Dimensions in Testimony, The Last Goodbye and Lala.

The day after Thanksgiving, the New York Times published an article called “In America’s Heartland, the Nazi Sympathizer Next Door,” by Richard Fausset. It profiles Tony Hovater, a 29-year-old far-right extremist and Nazi sympathizer who lives in the suburbs of Dayton, Ohio.

The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research invites research proposals from USC undergraduate students for its 2017 DEFY Summer Research Fellowships.

What I’ve learned, looking back at my family history and while working at USC Shoah Foundation, is how to do resistance. That’s how you do resistance. You see injustice and you tirelessly fight against it.

The Holocaust is inarguably the most heinous crime against a group of people we have seen in modern times. Despite decades of wrestling with how such an atrocity could have occurred and the postwar generation promising never again, history keeps repeating itself. Therefore, the collection and the custody of testimonies from those who bear witness remains a necessary task for as long as inhumanities keep occurring. Genocide and crimes against humanity transcend religions, cultures, languages, geographic regions, socioeconomics, gender, age, etc., making testimony collection across all cultures not only a moral responsibility, but imperative given the mission of USC Shoah Foundation. We know for sure that under a certain set of circumstances, genocide could happen anywhere, and again.

Four undergraduate students from around the world are hard at work developing new search capabilities for the Visual History Archive as part of the annual Research in Industrial Projects for Students (RIPS) program hosted by the UCLA Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM).

For the last four years, I have had the incredible opportunity to share the story of USC Shoah Foundation. I joined the communications team in July 2013 to manage the social media accounts for the Institute. I was excited to work at such an esteemed institution that was making a difference in the world.

Historian and filmmaker Christian Delage gave a public lecture at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research about different forms of testimony — in war crimes trials, oral history repositories, and documentary - and his recent project collecting interviews about the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris.

“Digital Approaches to Genocide Studies” was the first international conference bringing the fields of digital humanities and genocide studies together. Organized by the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research and cosponsored by the USC Digital Humanities Program, the conference convened 23 scholars from all over the world — the United States, Germany, Poland, France, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada.

At a first glance The Yellow Spot: The Extermination of the Jews in Germany is a book about the Holocaust. But in fact, it was published in 1936, after just three years of Nazi rule — and a full five years before the first gas chambers were commissioned for the murder of European Jewry. The authors spend 287 pages detailing a series of laws and actions taken against the Jews. Their conclusion was that the “legal disability” being imposed by the Nazis upon the Jews ultimately would result in their elimination. (Originally published by The Hollywood Reporter.)

A rare collection containing hundreds of artifacts and written material brought back from Nazi Germany by an American Jewish soldier has been acquired by the USC Libraries as part of a longstanding collaboration with the USC Shoah Foundation’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research.

Bartov centered his discussion on how the East Galician town of Buczacz was transformed from a site of coexistence – where Poles, Ukrainians and Jews had all lived side-by-side for centuries – into a site of genocide during World War II.