-   Call for Papers INoGS 9th International Conference Genocide and Survivor Communities: Agency, Resistance, Recognition June 23-26, 2024 University of Southern California Los Angeles On the ancestral and unceded territory of the Tongva and Kizh Nation peoples

The USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research mourns the death of Kim Simon who for the last decade served as Managing Director of the USC Shoah Foundation. She passed away on February 28, 2023.

They have gathered on living room sofas, on university lawns, in synagogue sanctuaries, in public squares, and even in embassy conference rooms for intimate conversations that have a resounding global impact. Since 2011, more than 2 million people have met with Holocaust survivors to learn about their experiences and to help carry their histories and their hopes into the future.

USC Shoah Foundation and USC Rossier School of Education and its Centers EDGE and CANDLES yesterday held a special public convening to recognize the Mickey Shapiro Endowed Chair in Holocaust Education Research. At a time of surging antisemitism in the United States and around the world, the new research chair will ensure the continuation of groundbreaking academic research into how testimony-based education can deepen and expand the study of Holocaust education worldwide.

April 8 is International Roma Day, an opportunity to celebrate the Romani and Sinti culture and raise awareness about the challenges faced by Europe’s largest ethnic minority. An estimated 70 to 80 percent of Europe’s Roma and Sinti population was killed by the Nazis and their Axis partners during World War Two, a genocide with impacts that reverberate through the community today.

The USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research mourns the death of Holocaust survivor Zenon Neumark, who was a close friend of the Center and passed away on March 27, 2023 at the age of 98 years old.

USC Shoah Foundation and The Latin American Network for Education on the Shoah (Red LAES) today launch an educational partnership dedicated to the study, teaching, and dissemination of Spanish-language Holocaust testimonies in Latin America. The new initiative, announced to coincide with Yom HaShoah, will undertake a range of innovative activities including the creation of a landing page on USC Shoah Foundation’s award-winning IWitness platform that will feature downloadable Spanish-language modules based on testimonies from the 56,000-strong Visual History Archive.

In July 2020, Ben Ferencz, the last remaining Nuremberg prosecutor who died earlier this month, sat for a Dimensions in Testimony Education interview. Below are excerpts from the three-day conversation, which was released today.   On his Place of Birth

Joseph Greenblatt believes it was the antisemitic taunts he endured throughout his childhood in Warsaw that led him to a life of resistance. He was a key player in the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and then took on the Germans again, this time with the Polish Home Army in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 — for which he later received a medal. Greenblatt’s testimony, recorded in New York City in 1996, is contained in USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive.

As the Nazis assumed power in Germany in 1933, many artists and intellectuals opposed to the regime sought refuge in Latin America, particularly in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico.

Wonder Woman star Gal Gadot opened her Los Angeles home to friends and family earlier this week to commemorate Yom HaShoah by hosting an intimate conversation with Holocaust survivor Celina Biniaz, the youngest female on Oskar Schindler’s famed list.

USC Shoah Foundation is saddened by the passing of Alan Moskin, a Jewish veteran of the U.S. Armed Forces who, at the age of 18, helped liberate Gunskirchern, a subcamp of Mauthausen Concentration Camp, in May 1945. Later in life, Alan became a tireless advocate for Holocaust education and remembrance at schools, veterans’ groups, and in the media, speaking with candor about the horror he witnessed at the camp, the brutality of combat, and the bigotry he encountered in the U.S. Army. 

Sedda Antekelian, a member of USC Shoah Foundation’s education team, never knew her own great grandmother had recorded testimony about surviving the Armenian Genocide. Hearing her great grandmother’s voice for the first time has brought Sedda closer to family, filled in gaps about her own history, and opened even more questions.

Between 1938 and 1940 an estimated 17,000 mostly Austrian and German Jews traveled from Europe to Shanghai, many on luxury liners. They were escaping the upsurge of violent antisemitism in Europe and headed primarily to Shanghai, at the time one of the few places in the world without any immigration barriers.

USC Shoah Foundation this fall launches a new Antisemitism Lecture Series to showcase to wider audiences the latest scholarly research on the topic and convene some of the leading scholars in the field.  

In this blog, the Center's 2022-2023 Greenberg Research Fellow Raíssa Alonso reflects on resistance and the roots of her research. 

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

USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of Marta (Weiss) Wise, who was ten years old when she was liberated from Auschwitz, having endured the medical torture of Josef Mengele, along with her sister, Eva (Weiss) Slonim. She was 88. Marta and Eva were among a group of children pictured in a photograph—a still from a film shot by a Soviet cameraman soon after the liberation of Auschwitz—that became an iconic image of the horrors of the death camp where nearly one million Jews were killed during the Holocaust.

The USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research will cohost the 17th biennial Lessons & Legacies conference, which will take place at Claremont McKenna College and the University of Southern California from November 14 to November 17, 2024. Organized and sponsored by the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University (HEFNU) in partnership with host universities, the biennial Lessons & Legacies of the Holocaust Conference (popularly known as Lessons & Legacies) is the premier international scholarly gathering in Holocaust Studies.

The USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of Thomas Buergenthal, one of the youngest known survivors of Auschwitz, who later became an esteemed human rights attorney and United States representative on the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Thomas passed away on May 29, 2023, in Miami, Florida. He was 89.

The USC Shoah Foundation mourns the June 6, 2023 passing of Joshua Kaufman, who survived Auschwitz and was liberated at Dachau Concentration Camp at the age of 17, and was recognized at the 2019 State of the Union address in Washington, D.C. He was 95.

A longtime scholar affiliate of the USC Shoah Foundation has received a $50,000 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant to transcribe and translate the Maya-Kaqchikel and Spanish-language testimonies of survivors of the Guatemalan genocide.

Clara Dijkstra, a PhD candidate in History at the University of Cambridge, Christ’s College, has been awarded the 2023-2024 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 September 2023 to conduct research on the experiences of Jews and Roma (Tsiganes) in detention and internment camps in France during the Second World War.

Clara Dijkstra, a PhD candidate in History at the University of Cambridge, Christ’s College, has been awarded the 2023-2024 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 September 2023 to conduct research on the experiences of Jews and Roma (Tsiganes) in detention and internment camps in France during the Second World War.

Christina Wirth, a Ph.D. student at the Leibniz Institute for European History in Mainz, Germany, is to be the USC Shoah Foundation’s first Robert J. Katz Research Fellow in Antisemitism Studies. She will be in residence at the Institute in April 2024.

The USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research is one of the conveners for the conference "Archives in/of Transit: Historical Perspectives from the 1930s to the Present", which will take place at the University of Southern California from June 28 to June 29, 2024.

Alexandra Szabó, a PhD candidate in History at Brandeis University, has been awarded the 2023-2024 Margee and Douglas Greenberg Research Fellowship at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research. She will be residence for a month during the Spring 2024 semester to conduct research for her dissertation, in which she investigates Hungarian Romani and Jewish women’s experiences of fertility abuses (failed pregnancies, miscarriages, sterilizations, postwar infertility) in the shadow of Nazi persecution.

Julie Fitzpatrick, a PhD candidate in History at Royal Holloway, University of London, has been awarded the 2023-2024 Breslauer, Rutman, and Anderson Research Fellowship at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research. She will be in residence at the Center for a month from mid-October to mid-November 2023 to conduct research for her dissertation, which is currently entitled "‘Light the Candles and Lay the Table’: A Study on German-Jewish Women’s Relationship with Food During the Prewar, Wartime and Postwar Eras."

The USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of our friend Dr. Richard Gable Hovannisian, a scholar who devoted his life to chronicling the 1915 Armenian Genocide and donated the more than 1,000 survivor and witness testimonies he amassed to the USC Shoah Foundation. He was 90. Born to Armenian Genocide survivors in Tulare, California, in 1932, Dr. Hovannisian was initially discouraged from learning his parents’ language and knew little about Armenian history.

The USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research mourns the death of Richard G. Hovannisian, who was a close friend of the Center and passed away on July 10, 2023 at the age of 90 years old.