In recognition for their longstanding commitment to humanitarian efforts and education, Mellody Hobson and George Lucas were presented December 7 with the Ambassador for Humanity Award by Steven Spielberg, USC trustee and founder of USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education.

If you’ve ever watched genocide survivor testimony from the Visual History Archive and it spurred you to wonder what you can do to help prevent acts of intolerance and inhumanity, USC Shoah Foundation has an opportunity for you this holiday season.

If you’ve ever watched genocide survivor testimony from the Visual History Archive and it spurned you to wonder what you can do to help prevent acts of intolerance and inhumanity, USC Shoah Foundation has an opportunity for you this holiday season.

A distinguished voice of history has been lost today in the passing of Auschwitz survivor Roman Kent, who captured the agony of the Holocaust and the power of love in his telling of a simple story about his childhood dog, Lala. Kent was 92.

It’s been 80 years since Kristallnacht, a pogrom organized by Nazis against Jews in Germany and Austria, but as we’ve seen in recent weeks, the threat of antisemitic violence remains a horrifying possibility. Access educational resources that draw from the Institute's Visual History Archive.

The Czech project Ours or Foreign? Jews in the Czech 20th Century delivered materials and training to 600 educators in the last fiscal year and added a new unit on the Terezín family camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau featuring testimony clips from the Visual History Archive.

Their focus is on Mexican-American youth activism of the 1930s and ‘40s, but the students in USC’s Echoes of the Mexican Voice journalism course will draw on aspects of USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive when they create their own multimedia website this semester.

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.

The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research invites proposals for its 2018-2019 International Teaching Fellowship that will provide support for university and college faculty to integrate testimonies from the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive (VHA) into new or existing courses.

The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research invites research proposals from advanced standing Ph.D. candidates for its 2016-2017 Margee and Douglas Greenberg Research Fellowship. The fellowship provides $4,000 support for dissertation research focused on testimony from the Visual History Archive.

The USC Shoah Foundation has partnered with the National Library of Israel to provide Israelis with the first countrywide access to the Institute's entire Visual History Archive, including testimonies from more than 52,000 Holocaust survivors and hundreds of survivors of the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks.

Our thoughts are with the families and community of those who were murdered at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh -- the most deadly antisemitic attack in U.S. history. We have curated a handful of resources to help educators engage students in meaningful dialogue.

The Holocaust collection in USC Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive contains nearly 53,000 testimonies; however, only a mere six of those testimonies are from survivors who were persecuted by the Nazis for being gay: one in English, three in German, one in French, and one in Dutch. There are other gay survivors we have in the Archive, but they were persecuted by the Nazis for the greater sin of being Jewish; Gad Beck being one of them. The meager number says a lot about the history of the gay men who lived through the Nazi regime and who came out the other end willing and unafraid to speak about their lives.

To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide and the first integration of Armenian Genocide testimonies into the Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation will release one clip from the Armenian Genocide collection on the Institute’s website each day for the next 30 days.

A three-day seminar will be held November 22-24 in Kyiv to train Ukrainian teachers of social sciences and humanities, university tutors of law and human rights activists on the use of a new multimedia teacher’s guide titled Where do Human Rights Begin: History and Contemporary Approaches.

The Junior Interns will spend the next several months engrossing themselves in analyzing what attitudes breed hatred and intolerance, how they can spread positive moral authority and how to become an active participant in civil society, using USC Shoah Foundation’s IWitness activities and the Visual History Archive.

The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research invites research proposals from advanced standing Ph.D. candidates for its 2016-2017 Inaugural Robert J. Katz Research Fellowship in Genocide Studies. The fellowship provides $4,000 support for dissertation research focused on testimony from the Visual History Archive.

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.

The 54,000 voices of genocide survivors and eyewitnesses preserved in the Visual History Archive can inspire and guide us while we make the sometimes difficult choices to be tolerant, to become educated, to stand up and take action against the many wrongs in the world.

In 2017, Mr. Feingold recorded a more than 4 hour testimony with USC Shoah Foundation as part of the Last Chance Testimony Collection, enabling Holocaust survivors to share their stories for USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive—before it is too late—where they will exist in perpetuity.

In the immediate aftermath of the Armenian genocide, thousands of Armenian survivors recorded testimonies detailing the atrocities they witnessed at the hands of the Ottoman Turks during World War I. And yet it wouldn’t be until the 1990s before historians would begin taking these oral histories seriously.

In recognition of their longstanding commitment to humanitarian causes and support of veterans, Rita Wilson and Tom Hanks were presented the Ambassador for Humanity Award by Kate Capshaw and Steven Spielberg, USC trustee and founder of USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education.

"New Perspectives on Kristallnacht: After 80 Years, the Nazi Pogrom in Global Comparison" 

Polish educators shared the innovative ways they have used testimony in their classrooms since they completed USC Shoah Foundation’s Master Teacher program last year.

Czech educators are gathering at the Academy of Sciences in Prague today to attend a conference dedicated to the "Ours or Foreign? Jews in the Czech 20th Century" project from the Jewish Museum of Prague.

UCLA emeritus professor of Armenian and Near Eastern History Richard Hovannisian will meet with staff at USC Shoah Foundation on September 17.

On April 21 through 23, the USC Shoah Foundation Institute participated in an international conference, "History Unlimited: Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture." The conference asked the question of whether ethical or aesthetic limits should be placed on how the Holocaust is represented in fiction or nonfiction.

After signing the Munich Agreement in September 1938 and under the pretext of protecting the interests of ethnic Germans who agitated for Nazi rule, Hitler annexed the Czechoslovakian borderlands. While some still hoped that giving up Czechoslovak territory would bring peace, the agreement signed by Great Britain, Germany, Italy, and France meant the beginning of occupation for the citizens of Czechoslovakia.

You never know what you will find in the Visual History Archive. You hear stories of survival, death, life, hope and even friendship amidst the chaos of genocide. Sidney Shafner and Marcel Levy have remained friends for over 70 years – since the liberation of the concentration camp Dachau.