Carli Snyder, a PhD candidate in History at the City University of New York (CUNY), has been awarded the 2022-2023 USC Shoah Foundation USC Shoah Foundation Robert J. Katz Research Fellowship in Genocide Studies. She will be in residence at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research in January 2023 to conduct research for her dissertation “‘The Flesh of the Facts’”: Toward a Feminist Holocaust Consciousness."

Ryan Cheuk Him Sun, a PhD candidate in History at the University of British Columbia, Canada, has been awarded the 2022-2023 Breslauer, Rutman, and Anderson Research Fellowship at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research. He will be in residence at the Center for a month during the Spring 2023 semester.

USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of our friend Max Eisen, a Holocaust survivor who returned to Auschwitz-Birkenau more than 20 times as an educator and testified at the trials of two SS guards in 2015, more than 70 years after his entire family was killed in Nazi concentration camps. Max’s memoir, By Chance Alone: A Remarkable True Story of Courage and Survival at Auschwitz, was the 2019 winner of Canada Reads, a Canadian Broadcasting Company “battle of the books” program, and was shortlisted for the RBC Taylor Prize in 2017. 

USC Shoah Foundation and the Museum of Jewish Heritage are joining forces on July 12 to host the official New York City premiere of My Name Is Sara, a feature film based on the true story of a young girl’s survival during the Holocaust while hiding in plain sight in the Ukrainian countryside. Produced in association with USC Shoah Foundation, the film was an Official Selection at over 50 festivals internationally, taking home five Best Feature Awards. Strand Releasing will bring the movie to New York theatres on July 13, 2022 and nationwide beginning July 22, 2022.

July 11 marks 26 years since the Srebrenica genocide, the biggest in a cluster of massacres that occurred as part of the campaign of ethnic cleansing in eastern parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina during the 1992-1995 war in the country. It’s the day in 1995 that Bosnian Serb forces led by General Ratko Mladic overran the enclave of Srebrenica, the town in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina the United Nations had formally designated as a “safe area” in 1993. 

Holocaust survivor and USC Shoah Foundation friend Max Eisen passed away earlier this month, leaving a unique legacy forged by harrowing wartime experiences, 20 return trips to Auschwitz-Birkenau as an educator, and the testimony he gave against two SS guards in Germany beginning in 2015.

Our longtime friend Pinchas Gutter turns 90 today! The survivor of six German Nazi concentration camps has shared his remarkable story with USC Shoah Foundation in a variety of formats over the years, including as a Dimensions in Testimony interactive biography that has been featured by media outlets including CBS 60 Minutes and the New York Times. Earlier this year Pinchas sat down with us to reflect on contemporary events and his experiences. 

For the first time in two years, USC Shoah Foundation welcomed students to its international headquarters at USC for the fifth annual Leadership Workshop-Action and Values.  Eighteen rising ninth to 12th-grade students, selected from across the country, participated in the July 10 to 15 seminars, field trips, discussions, and group projects while based in USC dorms. 

A University of California linguist has been awarded a $470,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to analyze Yiddish-language testimonies contained in USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive.

August 2 was Roma Holocaust Memorial Day, the anniversary of the day in 1944 that nearly 3,000 Roma and Sinti women, men and children in Auschwitz-Birkenau’s Zigeunerlager (then known as the “Gypsy family camp”) were killed in the concentration camp’s gas chambers.

Each year, the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research hosts a team of scholars from different universities, different countries, and different academic disciplines for one week so that they can develop and discuss a collaborative, innovative, and interdisciplinary research project in the fi

When Zuzanna Surowy needed to make herself cry as the lead actress in the Holocaust-era feature film My Name Is Sara, she followed the advice of her co-star to “put a demon inside of her” – to imagine something so tragic it would bring tears to her eyes. It was much harder for Surowy, then 15, to follow the second half of that directive: to leave the demon on the set.

USC Shoah Foundation today presents the first of two events in Aspen, Colorado hosted by Melinda Goldrich, a prominent member of the Aspen philanthropic community who serves on USC Shoah Foundation’s Board of Councilors’ Executive Committee.

In recognition of its pioneering work advancing Holocaust and Genocide Studies since its inception in 2014, the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research has been awarded the honor of hosting the next biennial meeting of the International Network of Genocide Scholars (INoGS). The INoGS 9th International Conference on Genocide will take place in June 2024 at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles and coincide with the Center’s 10-year anniversary celebration.

USC Shoah Foundation today launches its 500th IWitness activity with release of In Lisa's Footsteps, a primary level IWalk based on Mona Golabek’s acclaimed The Children of Willesden Lane books. In Lisa's Footsteps tells the story of Golabek’s mother, Lisa Jura, a young Holocaust survivor who in 1938 escaped from Vienna to London on the Kindertransport.

USC Shoah Foundation is accepting applications for USC student leaders to take part in the upcoming Stronger Than Hate Student Leadership Summit. Triggered by the deadly white nationalist rally of August 2017 in Charlottesville, VA, USC Shoah Foundation’s Stronger Than Hate initiative draws on the power of eyewitness testimony to help students and the general public recognize and counter antisemitism, racism, xenophobia and other forms of hatred.

USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of our friend Phillip Maisel, who died in Melbourne, Australia on August 22 just days after celebrating his 100th birthday. Born in Vilnus (now Lithuania) in 1922, Maisel lived through forced labor camps in Estonia, Germany and Poland before emigrating to Australia and going on to record more than 1,500 testimonies of his fellow Holocaust survivors. He called each recorded testimony “a miracle” and thereby earned the nickname “the keeper of miracles.” His memoir, published last year, was called The Keeper of Miracles.

USC Shoah Foundation with its partner the Schindler’s Ark Foundation has added a tour of Oskar Schindler’s former factory in what is now the Czech Republic to its mobile IWalk application, enabling smartphone users to explore the site where the German businessman sheltered more than 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust.

The USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research invites research proposals from USC undergraduate students and USC graduate students for the 2023 Beth and Arthur Lev Student Research Fellowship. The fellowship provides $1,500 support for USC undergraduate students or $3,000 support for USC graduate students doing research focused on the testimonies of the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive and/or other related USC resources and collections for one month during the summer of 2023. The fellowship is open to USC undergraduate students and graduate students of all disciplines.

The pages of my copy of The Giver are totally worn. The cover has been folded and there are subsequent pages with the same type of tear. On the bottom right corner is an advertisement for a special low price of $2.99 and in the upper right corner there is the embedded medal of the John Newbery Prize, one of the most prestigious prizes in literature.

USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of Edward Mosberg, a Holocaust survivor whose passion for sharing his story through lectures, recorded interviews, and educational trips back to concentration camps in Europe taught and inspired people everywhere. He was 96.

Eighty-one years ago today Nazi soldiers and their collaborators committed one of the largest single massacres of the Holocaust with the murder of close to 33,000 Jews in the Babyn Yar ravine in Ukraine. The site of the atrocity on the outskirts of the capital Kyiv is now a memorial that people anywhere can visit with a new Virtual IWalk released by USC Shoah Foundation earlier this year. 

USC Shoah Foundation is accepting applications for the highly competitive William P. Lauder Junior Internship Program that begins November 13. Since 2014, the program has provided a dynamic and unique learning opportunity for hundreds of students to engage with testimonies from survivors and witnesses of genocide.  The program is looking for 40 grade 7-11 students nationwide who are representative of diverse backgrounds and academic skills. 

Pardy Minassian’s childhood in Syria was suffused with sounds from Armenia, the result of her father’s collection of more than 500 audio and video interviews he conducted over the years with Armenian Genocide survivors. When Pardy and her family left Syria for Armenia in 2012, the then 18-year-old student focused on a range of different Armenian sounds, earning a bachelor’s degree in Music Composition and a master's degree in Guitar Performance from the Yerevan State Komitas Conservatory. 

Rena Quint has worked hard to find a balance between moving beyond memory and living inside of it, between yearning to know—and have proof of—where she came from and what she lost, but of not wanting to be defined by it.

When Lee Liberman first viewed testimonies from USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive (VHA) almost 25 years ago, she was immediately moved to action. “We have a commitment and duty to humanity to combat hate, and we must work diligently to bring these testimonies to communities around the globe,” she said. More than two decades later, as Lee transitions to an emeritus role after a successful term as Chair of the Institute’s Board of Councilors, she has more than delivered on her pledge.

USC Shoah Foundation today launches a series of professional development webinars that provide educators with testimony-based resources that support accelerated learning practices across the curriculum. The focus on accelerated learning comes as schools return to in-person instruction and teachers navigate the range of learning losses caused by the need for remote schooling during the Covid-19 pandemic.

USC Shoah Foundation has moved into the next chapter of its work, with noted international expert and governmental advisor on Holocaust remembrance and antisemitism Dr. Robert Williams appointed as Andrew J. and Erna Finci Viterbi Executive Director.

East Coast dance artist Rachel Linsky combines movement and testimony to create a novel form of Holocaust education.  Rachel directs and choreographs ZACHOR, an initiative that honors Holocaust survivors through dance. Her latest work in the project is Hidden, a dance film and production based on the story of Aaron Elster, a Jewish boy who from 1943 to 1945 hid from Nazi persecution in the attic of a Polish family. 

Today we remember the lives lost at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh on October 27, 2018. The Shabbat morning attack, in which 11 worshippers were killed and six wounded—including several Holocaust survivors—was the deadliest act of antisemitic violence in United States history. Synagogue member Judah Samet, a Hungarian-born survivor of the Holocaust, sat trapped in his car in the synagogue parking lot that Saturday morning as law enforcement agents engaged in a gun battle with the shooter.