For the last four years, I have had the incredible opportunity to share the story of USC Shoah Foundation. I joined the communications team in July 2013 to manage the social media accounts for the Institute. I was excited to work at such an esteemed institution that was making a difference in the world.

Mireille Knoll managed to survive the Nazis during the Holocaust, but antisemitism is ancient and tenacious, and its tentacles finally caught up with her last week at her home in Paris. The 85-year-old Knoll was stabbed 11 times and burned after attackers – a neighbor and a homeless man – tried to set her apartment ablaze. The men, both in their 20s, were later arrested for a crime that is being investigated as an antisemitic attack. “She’s a Jew, she must have money,” said one attacker to the other, according to Gérard Collomb, the interior minister of France.

The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research invites proposals for its 2019- 2020 Interdisciplinary Research Week that will provide support for an interdisciplinary group of international scholars to develop and discuss a collaborative innovative research project in the field of Holocaust and Genocide Studies using the video testimonies of the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive (VHA) and other related resources at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

USC Shoah Foundation mourns the loss of László Kiss, a survivor of Auschwitz who played an integral role in USC Shoah Foundation’s educational efforts in Hungary. László died January 25 at the age of 94 in Budapest, where he has lived since after the World War II.

In October 1942, when deportations from the Warsaw ghetto paused, more than 20 youth groups and underground units coalesced into a united front. Vladka Meed channeled her despair at losing her family into fighting the Nazis.

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.

In the Spring 2014 issue of PastForward, Holocaust survivor Roman Kent shares his story of survival, education and one very special dog.

Maximilian Kolbe, born in Poland in 1894, was a Franciscan friar and Catholic priest. He spent most of his life studying theology and dedicating himself to the church, traveling across Europe and Asia during his lifetime.

Historian and filmmaker Christian Delage gave a public lecture at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research about different forms of testimony — in war crimes trials, oral history repositories, and documentary - and his recent project collecting interviews about the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris.

In 2019, the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research conducted deep and wide-ranging outreach, introducing the Visual History Archive to scholars, academic faculty, fellows, librarians, and students through in-depth workshops, demonstrations, consultations, and class introductions.

“Digital Approaches to Genocide Studies” was the first international conference bringing the fields of digital humanities and genocide studies together. Organized by the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research and cosponsored by the USC Digital Humanities Program, the conference convened 23 scholars from all over the world — the United States, Germany, Poland, France, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada.

At this public panel organized by the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, three international scholars presented about the evolution of Nazi camps, illuminating different types of camps and how the functions and purposes of camps changed, often serving multiple functions as external and internal conditions changed over time.

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.

At a first glance The Yellow Spot: The Extermination of the Jews in Germany is a book about the Holocaust. But in fact, it was published in 1936, after just three years of Nazi rule — and a full five years before the first gas chambers were commissioned for the murder of European Jewry. The authors spend 287 pages detailing a series of laws and actions taken against the Jews. Their conclusion was that the “legal disability” being imposed by the Nazis upon the Jews ultimately would result in their elimination. (Originally published by The Hollywood Reporter.)

Rare primary-source photographs that focus on the life and culture of the Armenian people before the Armenian Genocide and the resiliency among the ensuing diaspora have been integrated into USC Shoah Foundation’s award-winning IWitness educational website. The addition comes thanks to a new partnership with Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives, whose mission is to collect, document, preserve, and present the historic and modern photographic record of Armenians and Armenian heritage.

Pictured: Holocaust survivor Elly Gotz who gave his testimony to the Azrieli Foundation in 2018. His interview is one of 31 new testimonies from the Azrieli Foundation that have been indexed and catalogued in the Visual History Archive. This week’s semi-annual VHA release adds 128 new testimonies to the 55,000-strong collection. All the updated testimonies are available at 163 access sites worldwide.

What makes Gad Beck’s story so remarkable, however, was that not only was he a “Mischling” but he was also a gay teenager living in Nazi Berlin, the epicenter of a military power antagonistic to both Jews and gays.

Kiril Feferman, PhD, the 2015-2016 Center Fellow, gave a public lecture at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research focusing on the underresearched topic of the role of religion in influencing the behavior and decisions of Jews and non-Jews in the Nazi-occupied Soviet territories between 1941 and 1944.

From September 11 to September 14, 2016, the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide hosted the international conference "A Conflict? Genocide and Resistance in Guatemala."

A rare collection containing hundreds of artifacts and written material brought back from Nazi Germany by an American Jewish soldier has been acquired by the USC Libraries as part of a longstanding collaboration with the USC Shoah Foundation’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research.

Bartov centered his discussion on how the East Galician town of Buczacz was transformed from a site of coexistence – where Poles, Ukrainians and Jews had all lived side-by-side for centuries – into a site of genocide during World War II.

Hailed by some as a milestone in Ottoman Empire scholarship, the new book “Armenians in Ottoman Turkey, 1914” was the product of a manuscript that was donated to the Institute’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research in 2016. It will be a boon for testimony indexers and other researchers at the Institute.

Each year, the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research hosts an interdisciplinary team of scholars from different universities and different countries for one week so that they can develop and discuss a collaborative innovative research project in the field of Holocaust and Genocide

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. 

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

USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education to host its first International Digital Access, Outreach, and Research Conference.

When Deborah Long was a teenager, she often came home to find her mother sitting with the latest issues of Life or Look magazine, quietly tearing out pages. “You see this picture?” her mother would say. “She looks a little like my older sister Ryfka.” Or, “This movie star right here? He reminds me of my father. So handsome.”

Professor Atina Grossmann gave a public lecture co-hosted by the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research and the USC Max Kade Institute, offering a different reading of World War II and the Holocaust by mapping Jewish death, survival, and displacement via what she called the geographical margins – the colonial and semi-colonial regions including the Soviet interior, Central Asia, Iran, and British India.

Robert Widerman Clary was among the first 100 Holocaust survivors interviewed for USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, and he conducted 75 interviews of other survivors. In his testimony, he talks about his instinct and talent for entertaining—honed while he was a child in Paris—saved and shaped his life.

In January 2015, I traveled to Poland for the Auschwitz: Past is Present professional development program, commemorating the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau. This entire experience, was and continues to be a life changing event for me on every level personally, professionally, and academically.