“Pastrami, Tacos, Burgers: Continuity and Change in Boyle Heights” is now published on IWitness, incorporating Holocaust survivor testimony clips into a guided walk through the historic immigrant community of Boyle Heights, Los Angeles.

The conference seeks to address a dearth of psychological support for hundreds of thousands of refugees left traumatized by the reign of the Islamic State – also known as ISIS – between 2014 and 2017.

USC Shoah Foundation has announced a new fellowship for a U.S.-based secondary-level educator to produce testimony-based instructional resources about the Armenian Genocide. The Armenian Genocide Education—Keep the Promise Teacher Fellowship will train an educator with content expertise in Armenian Genocide education to develop teaching material using the latest innovative technologies in IWitness, the Institute’s award-winning digital educational platform.

Stephen Feinberg remembers always finding the study of history to be interesting and exciting. During his studies as an undergraduate and graduate student, he was introduced to the history of the Holocaust. “I became increasingly aware that this was a watershed event in history,” he recalls. “Therefore, I felt that it should be taught in schools.”

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.

Thursday, December 9, 2010. Steven Spielberg, Founder of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute, presented DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg with the USC Shoah Foundation Institute’s highest honor, the Ambassadors for Humanity Award.

A special delegation of staff and supporters of the USC Shoah Foundation arrived in Rwanda yesterday to begin a weeklong mission to learn about the Institute’s work in Rwanda, reinforce their commitment, and share the experience with others.

When Barbara Winton visited USC Shoah Foundation last week, it wasn’t just the testimonies that talk about how her father saved hundreds of lives during the Holocaust that impressed her – it was how these testimonies are being used to educate the next generation.

Music is the purest form of communication. It transcends language and ignores the passage of time. It can be euphoric and elegiac, subtle and sublime. It joyously welcomes life and mournfully greets death. It can provide glimmers of hope and comfort in a world devoid of hope and comfort.

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.

Belle Mayer of New York was a prosecutor on the team that tried I.G. Farben, one of Nazi Germany’s largest government contractors, which had a large stake in creating the Zyklon-B poison used in death-camp gas chambers.

Last week a group of us from USC Shoah Foundation were in Guatemala with our testimony partner, the Foundation for Forensic Anthropology in Guatemala (FAFG). We attended the funeral of a Mayan man whose remains were recently exhumed by FAFG – 36 years after he disappeared during the genocide there.

The portrait I have been working on of Dario isn’t complete yet, but what an honor it was to have met him and is now to engage with his testimony through the act of painting,” said David Kassan of hi

USC Shoah Foundation today mourns the loss of a close friend, George Weiss, a longtime volunteer with the Institute and a Holocaust survivor who endured homelessness and life on the run as a young child separated from his parents in both France and Belgium during the war. He was 87. Weiss was a familiar and beloved presence at the offices of the Institute, stopping in every week to curate and work with clips of video testimony from the Visual History Archive, which contains 55,000 life stories of survivors and witnesses to the Holocaust and other genocides.

Last month, I had the amazing opportunity to travel to Warsaw and Krakow with USC Shoah Foundation’s mission to Poland for the Auschwitz: Past is Present program, commemorating the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. I had many unforgettable experiences throughout these four days traveling and meeting incredible people who are all interested in the work of USC Shoah Foundation and its mission of changing the world through testimony.

When I met Auschwitz survivor Eva Mozes Kor in January, she was dozing on a chair that doubles as her walker, wearing a contented smile while a flurry of activity buzzed around her. 

For weeks, Eva (Geiringer) Schloss and a small band of young women had been exploring the far corners of the women’s section of Auschwitz-Birkenau, alone and, for the first time in months, unwatched. It was January 1945, and Allied forces were nearing the camp. The SS had already evacuated most of the surviving inmates by way of middle-of-the-night marches in freezing temperatures. The gas chambers and crematoria had been destroyed. The SS guards had fled.

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.

The 2014 cohort of Teaching with Testimony in the 21st Century in Poland reunited to share the lessons they piloted in their classrooms over the past year, with impressive results.

Starting Thursday, Tribeca Film Festival attendees will be able to walk alongside Holocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter as he tours the concentration camp where his parents and sister lost their lives during World War II.

IWitness users will notice some new features in the latest update of WeVideo. Students and teachers will enjoy new motion titles, premium music, and more advanced features like the ability to add transitions on all tracks, one of the most asked-for features from users.

Daniel Conway, Texas A&M University, and Nancy Sinkoff, Rutgers University, have both been in residence at the Center for Advanced Genocide Research this week.

“Filming the Camps” explores the World War II experiences of Hollywood directors John Ford, George Stevens and Samuel Fuller.

The 1:30-3:30 p.m. panel on the second day of the Digital Approaches to Genocide Studies conference at USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research will gather three scholars who create maps, not of geographic places of genocide, but rather the personal journeys and social networks of survivors as they went on their trajectories through the Holocaust and Cambodian Genocide.

Comcast Xfinity subscribers can watch the film on-demand as part of USC Shoah Foundation’s PastFORWARD broadcast through December 29.

Jean-Marc Dreyfus, PhD, Reader in Holocaust Studies in the History department at the University of Manchester (United Kingdom) has been awarded the 2018-2019 Center Research Fellowship.

During the Institute's inaugural summer William P. Lauder Internship Program, about two-dozen young people came to USC Shoah Foundation from across the country to participate in the intensive program, which focused on the causes and impacts of injustice and the ways an individual can respond.

Call for Papers: International Conference "Memory through the Screen: Polish Cinema and WWII" October 18-19, 2018 USC Department of Slavic Language and Literature's 3rd Annual Film Conference at the University of Southern California When a film is created, it is created in a language, which is not only about words, but also the way that very language encodes our perception of the world, our understanding of it. –Andrzej Wajda  

A consortium of more than 40 Hungarian academic institutions and public libraries signs on, bringing the total number of worldwide subscribers to 138.