In this blog, Center visiting scholar Robson Bello discusses his focus on play during his month of research. 

The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research and the USC Casden Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life invite proposals for their 2018 International Conference “New Perspectives on Kristallnacht: After 80 Years, the Nazi Pogrom in Global Comparison”.

In her public lecture on Feb. 9 at USC, Walch outlined the process by which Jews in Berlin lost their rights, access to public spaces, ability to move freely, and finally their own homes, from 1933-38. Throughout her talk, Walch referred to the testimonies in the Visual History Archive.

Dario Gabbai, whose testimony is in the Visual History Archive, stopped by the USC Shoah Foundation last week to donate World War II era documents and artifacts for preservation and research.

About a month before the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, sparking World War II, a desperate Jewish father in Germany penned a letter in broken English to a friend in England, Mrs. Wolf.  “I beg to inform you that we have got a refuse from the Aid Committee in London, owing to our high waiting number for America. … We are very discouraged by this answer and are now forced to get out our children as quick as possible.” Alfons Lasker, an attorney in Breslau, was on a mission to get his two daughters – Anita and Renate – out of Germany. He did not succeed.

USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research and the USC Casden Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life invite proposals for their 2018 International Conference.

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.

USC Shoah Foundation’s Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Collection will gain at least five more testimonies this spring when Project Director Jacqueline Semha Gmach travels to Paris for four months.

A new anthology "From Testimony to Story: Video Interviews about Nazi Crimes: Perspectives and Experiences in Four Countries" includes two chapters about USC Shoah Foundation, written by its regional consultants in Czech Republic and Poland.

The future of Polish-Israeli relations can be driven by compassion and forgiveness, or a retreat behind walls of fossilized antisemitism, essentialist prejudice, nationalistic egotism, and fear.

Another year dominated by the ongoing pandemic draws to a close. From producing animated films to conducting interviews, forging new partnerships and sharing incredible testimonies, 2021 was a year to remember. Here are some of the highlights of the work the Institute has accomplished.

The USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research is proud to announce its cooperation with a German government funded multi-institutional Holocaust research project entitled #LastSeen - Pictures of Nazi Deportations.

Staff and scholars of the USC Shoah Foundation will participate in discussion about the latest in Holocaust studies at the Association of Holocaust Organizations (AHO)’s 29th annual conference this week in St. Petersburg, Fla.

As part of the program, 100 survivors of Auschwitz, the German Nazi concentration and extermination camp, will travel to Poland to attend and participate in the official observance of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on Jan. 27, 2015.

Making DiT accessible at no-cost to educators and students through IWitness provides students anywhere in the world with the opportunity to have a conversational experience with survivors of the Holocaust and other witnesses to history. And at the Holocaust & Genocide Centres in Johannesburg and Durban, that’s exactly what students did, with a total of 400 learners interfacing with an interactive recorded video of Pinchas, a Jewish survivor of six Nazi concentration camps.

USC Shoah Foundation and the Maimonides Institute for Medicine, Ethics and the Holocaust are partnering to develop new and innovative educational programing on medical ethics and the Holocaust. The Holocaust marked a profound and sadistic deviation from traditional notions of medical ethics, with medical and scientific communities in the Third Reich actively participating in the labeling, persecution and eventual mass murder of millions deemed “unfit.”

Teresa Walch, the 2016-2017 Inaugural Robert J. Katz Research Fellow in Genocide Studies, gave a public lecture at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research focusing on the calculated and gradual exclusion of Jews from public spaces and ultimately from their own homes that began in the 1930s.

Professor Marion Kaplan, 2018-2019 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, gave the annual Shapiro Scholar public lecture on gender and the Holocaust.

The risk of the Holocaust is not that it will be forgotten, but that it will be embalmed and surrounded by monuments and used to absolve all future sins.   - Zygmunt Bauman 2018 Polish-Israeli Crisis: History, Trauma, and Politics of Cultural Memory The future of Polish-Israeli relations can be driven by compassion and forgiveness, or a retreat behind walls of fossilized antisemitism, essentialist prejudice, nationalistic egotism, and fear. 1968-2018

Today marks the launch of #BeginsWithMe, a social media campaign led by USC Shoah Foundation that encourages people to share what they will do to learn from the Holocaust and help fight prejudice and intolerance.

"During the Holocaust I was living in a cocoon, with blinders. I lived completely in the present moment, because at any second, any Nazi, any German, any Kapo, could do away with me. You were like a gnat that they could squash. So, you lived inside a cocoon and hoped that one the day the butterfly would come out."

Maximilian Strnad, a young German scholar who is currently a fellow at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s research center, gave a public lecture at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research focusing on the experiences of the last remaining Jews under the German Reich — intermarried Jews.

There is a current controversy about the allegation that the great mufti of Jerusalem instigated the final solution of the Nazis. While there is no doubt that Haj Amin al-Husseini, was a virulent anti-Semite, history shows that the Final Solution was conceived and implemented by Nazis and nobody else.

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.

In the 1980s, a tiny woman in her 50s named Ruth Westheimer shocked and delighted the world with her blunt advice – delivered in a grandmotherly German accent – about sex. She became a media sensation and remains a household name as “Dr. Ruth.” Less known is her perilous journey to get there – a story that includes her survival of the Holocaust and immigration to British-controlled Mandatory Palestine, where she briefly became a sniper in a Jewish paramilitary force.

Holocaust survivor testimony to enhance education initiative in the Czech Republic In the Czech Republic, Holocaust survivors’ eyewitness testimonies will soon be used to teach a different aspect of local history: the imprisonment of Czechoslovak citizens in the Soviet Gulag.

The 10-part Echoes and Reflections series continues with Lesson 9: Perpetrators, Collaborators and Bystanders

The Holocaust Memorial Center in Budapest has launched a one-year long Fellowship Program in Holocaust Education for curriculum developers and teacher trainers.The Fellowship – a unique initiative in Hungary - is a yearlong program during which participants have to develop their own project in Holocaust Education. The major milestones of the year include a one-week intensive seminar, individual and group consultations, a four-day study tour to Holocaust-related sites, and a closing conference.

Elizabeth Holtzman, who is the subject of an IWitness activity, is among four Homeland Security advisory council members who resigned in protest of the U.S. government’s policy of separating children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border.

The ethics of studying Holocaust medical experiments will be the topic of conversation at the first-ever Zygo Student Lunchtime Series panel Friday at 12:30 p.m in USC Doheny Memorial Library room G28.