Modern day Kentucky and WWII-era Austria may seem worlds apart, but the far-flung locales and distant timeframes came together last month at a series of educational workshops at the Iroquois Branch Library in south Louisville. Over the course of five weeks, a group of young children and their caregivers gathered each Saturday morning for a special educational series sponsored by the National Center for Families Learning (NCFL) and The Willesden Project, a program of USC Shoah Foundation and Hold On To Your Music Foundation, with support from the Koret Foundation. 

Gitow will consult on a variety of topics and initiate collaborations between the Shoah Foundation and the UN.

J. Michael Hagopian's prized 16mm Ariflex camera, which he used to record testimonies of Armenian Genocide survivors, is now in the possession of the USC Shoah Foundation.

June 20 is World Refugee Day, dedicated to raising awareness about refugees throughout the world, a day on which I inevitably always look back on the formative years of my life. In 1991, my family and I were forced out of our home in Croatia because of our ethnic origin, and we began a life of exile, torn from everything known and dear to us and forced to swim in the uncharted waters of life as a refugee. Our lives had been changed drastically; a life of abundance had become a life of misery. 

To help combat the stresses of working with genocide, USC Shoah Foundation hosted a Trauma Education workshop for Aegis Trust and Kigali Genocide Memorial staff in Rwanda last week.

Three IWitness educators have authored an article about IWitness for the National Council for the Social Studies’ journal Social Education.

Educators gave hundreds of presentations on behalf of USC Shoah Foundation during the 2014-2015 fiscal year, introducing thousands of teachers and members of the public to testimony and IWitness.

Musician and music scholar Alexandra Birch will discuss the resistance demonstrated by one of the 20th century’s most renowned composers, Dmitri Shostakovich, in her presentation at the Music as Resistance to Genocide academic symposium.

In an effort to create a deeper engagement with educators online, USC Shoah Foundation’s educational website IWitness hosts monthly Twitter chats.

Carson Sizemore is already bracing for the tough conversations she will have in her 10th grade government class at her private high school in Albany, a small city on the banks of the Flint River in southwest Georgia. “I kind of have conflicting ideas with a lot of people in my family and my school. They’re more conservative, and I’m more in the middle somewhere,” Carson said. “I know there will be some debates in my government class.”

Michigan student Brandon Bartley shares how testimony inspired him when he participated in the IWitness Detroit program last summer.

Peace Week is a series of events to commemorate the conclusion of the four-year program.

"Silence is not an option" became the motto of over 100 guests who learned about USC Shoah Foundation’s mission to fight against hatred and intolerance through genocide survivor and witness testimony.

Students will explore the relationship between media and indifference through the work of Elie Wiesel, documentary film, personal responsibility and advocacy.

The first-ever recipient of USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research’s Genocide Prevention Research Fellowship is Vanessa Belén Dorda Meneses, a PhD candidate from the University of Chile.

Three graduates of USC Shoah Foundation’s Master Teacher program in Central Europe traveled to Los Angeles this week for additional training to take their use of IWitness and testimony to the next level.

New Dimensions in Testimony has been a work of passion for USC Shoah Foundation since 2010. After years of development at the University of Southern California including with USC Institute for Creative Technologies and with content developer Conscience Display, the program is now reaching audiences in museums around the world.

USC Shoah Foundation is saddened by the recent loss of Walter P. Loebenberg, a friend of the Institute and a Holocaust survivor who, after finding refuge in the United States, went on to open the Florida Holocaust Museum, one of the largest Holocaust museums in the nation. He was 94.

On this day, 27 years ago, my city of Sarajevo became a besieged city, and remained such for the following four years. A seven-year old at the time, I remember those first days of April of 1992 well. On one of them, my family’s Yugo 45 – an iconic car model of the former Yugoslavia – broke down right next to the Kasarna Maršala Tita (military barracks), where the U.S. Embassy is located today. Without a car, we could not go home that night, so we returned to my grandparents’ house. Later that night, the Bosnian Serb forces took away all the Bosnian Muslim men from our street and killed them. That Yugo 45, which we sold for some firewood months later, saved my father. This is how I remember that April of 1992.

Graduates of the Teaching with Testimony in the 21st Century professional development program came together last month to celebrate the program's 10th anniversary in Hungary. The event took place June 28-30th to commemorate the program's success and chart new opportunities for its graduates.

USC Shoah Foundation today launches a new Virtual IWalk web app that enables students and teachers to tour historic sites online while watching and listening to witness testimonies from the Visual History Archive.

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.

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.

Two USC Cinematic Arts professors, a former Student Voices winner and two independent filmmakers will judge this year’s Student Voices Short Film Contest.

As I write this, I am standing alongside 30 of the last 200 survivors of the Nanjing Massacre, which began 76 years ago Friday. Sirens sound around this Chinese city as the last few eyewitnesses of a massacre gather. Starting Dec. 13, 1937, and lasting six weeks, as many as 300,000 civilians were murdered during the atrocities.

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.

I look at the picture and realize this is why I’m working at the USC Shoah Foundation. This is what it’s all about. The photo shows two women standing in a field of green grass dotted with dandelions. The younger of the two has her arm wrapped around the other. The older woman smiles at the camera, while the other’s attention is focused only on her friend. The bond between them comes through; the love they share is unmistakable.

USC Shoah Foundation’s education staff have published an article revealing IWitness’s profound effect on high school students around the world in an annual publication by UNESCO.

Four of the conference’s educators will discuss how human rights and violence can be taught using digital technology and other innovative methods at the “Digital Pedagogy, Education, Human Rights and Violence Studies” roundtable, moderated by USC Shoah Foundation’s director of education, Kori Street.

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.