USC Shoah Foundation mourns the death of Sara Shapiro, a Holocaust survivor and mother of board member Mickey Shapiro.

In my role as part of USC Shoah Foundation’s Education Department, I have the honor of working with our team members both in the United States and around the world to create localized educational content using genocide survivor testimony. As a former classroom teacher and a lifelong believer in the importance of experiential learning, I was fortunate to take part in three IWalks in Budapest, Hungary, Prague, Czechia, and Warsaw, Poland while on a recent vacation.

The collaboration between USC Psychology Professor Beth Meyerowitz and the Center for Advanced Genocide Research is possibly the first large-scale examination of the challenges and rewards of engaging with survivor testimony.

The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research invites research proposals from USC faculty members and graduate students for its Summer 2018 Research Fellowships.

We are saddened to learn of the recent passing of Arkadii Vaispapir, one of few people ever to have survived the Sobibór death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland during the Holocaust. He was 96.

Over the course of their stay, the team built six IWitness activities focused on peace building in Rwanda. The first to go online will focus on Propaganda and Social Cohesion, which will be available for teachers and students by Tuesday, Feb. 13.

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.

  Call for Papers: The Future of Holocaust Testimonies V: An International Conference and Workshop March 11-13, 2019  The Holocaust Studies Program of Western Galilee College, the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, University of Southern California, and the Center for Judaic, Holocaust and Peace Studies, Appalachian State University, announce the fifth international interdisciplinary conference and workshop on The Future of Holocaust Testimonies to be held on 11–13 March 2019 in Akko, Israel.  

Virginia Bullington, a sophomore at USC from Nantucket, Massachusetts majoring in American Studies and Narrative Studies, has been chosen as the first-ever Beth and Arthur Lev Student Research Fellow at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research.

"The Girl and The Picture," a film by USC Shoah Foundation that centers on a survivor of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre in China, has been nominated for a 2018 International Documentary Association Award, which is considered among the world’s most important recognitions of the documentary genre.

The former goaltender for a well-known Rwandan team literally owes his life to soccer. Now he uses soccer to promote tolerance and unity. This year, he was recognized by Queen Elizabeth.

The Vienna native reflects on his 10-month tenure at the Institute, and the importance of the national reconciliation program that enables a select group of young Austrians to serve at organizations focused on Holocaust remembrance.

A daughter discovers her father’s secret past and shares his story with the world.

A pioneering moment for Holocaust education, the world’s first virtual reality film to take audiences through a concentration camp, launches as immersive experience at four museums in New York, California, Illinois and Florida for limited-engagement exhibit.

The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research first began a partnership with the Holocaust Geographies Collaborative in 2014, when the team visited the Institute to explore the ways in which the Visual History Archive can be used to create geographic visualizations of the Holocaust.

Musician Alex Biniaz-Harris, a former employee at USC Shoah Foundation, writes about his inspiration for a piano composition he is co-writing with Ambrose Soehn, a former intern at the Institute. The duo plans to perform the piece in Cambodia in January to commemorate that country’s upcoming 40-year anniversary of liberation from the genocide at the hands of the Khmer Rouge regime.

Geoffrey Robinson (University of California, Los Angeles) “The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965-66” October 4, 2018

Mireille Knoll managed to survive the Nazis during the Holocaust, but antisemitism is ancient and tenacious, and its tentacles finally caught up with her last week at her home in Paris. The 85-year-old Knoll was stabbed 11 times and burned after attackers – a neighbor and a homeless man – tried to set her apartment ablaze. The men, both in their 20s, were later arrested for a crime that is being investigated as an antisemitic attack. “She’s a Jew, she must have money,” said one attacker to the other, according to Gérard Collomb, the interior minister of France.

The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research invites proposals for its 2019- 2020 Interdisciplinary Research Week that will provide support for an interdisciplinary group of international scholars to develop and discuss a collaborative innovative research project in the field of Holocaust and Genocide Studies using the video testimonies of the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive (VHA) and other related resources at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

The young Nazi approached 13-year-old Szulem Czygielmamn as he walked on the sidewalk of Lubartowska Street in Lublin, Poland, and shoved him off the sidewalk. Szulem was lucky; Jews had died for less.

Rare primary-source photographs that focus on the life and culture of the Armenian people before the Armenian Genocide and the resiliency among the ensuing diaspora have been integrated into USC Shoah Foundation’s award-winning IWitness educational website. The addition comes thanks to a new partnership with Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives, whose mission is to collect, document, preserve, and present the historic and modern photographic record of Armenians and Armenian heritage.

Hailed by some as a milestone in Ottoman Empire scholarship, the new book “Armenians in Ottoman Turkey, 1914” was the product of a manuscript that was donated to the Institute’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research in 2016. It will be a boon for testimony indexers and other researchers at the Institute.

Julien Zarifian (University of Cergy-Pontoise, France) 2017-2018 Visiting Fulbright Scholar  “The United States and the Question of the Armenian Genocide” April 19, 2018

“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.

Included within the course’s syllabus is the testimony of Holocaust survivor Eva Slonim, who was depicted in an iconic photo of a group of children standing behind the barbed wire at Auschwitz. Slonim composed a poem along with a group of other children while imprisoned in Auschwitz.