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  You may not think it, but deep in the heart of Illinois, a significant population of students could be affected by the rollback of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) protections. Chief of Staff of Illinois State University’s student government Idan Rafalovitz, however, thinks his team will soon be well-equipped to help such students and others with a new inclusion initiative launched by USC Shoah Foundation.
/ Wednesday, October 11, 2017
Following the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum was created by the Vietnamese-backed government in an attempt to garner international legitimacy for the new regime. The museum, according to research fellow Timothy Williams at the Centre for Conflict Studies at Marburg University in Germany, seeks to shock visitors and demonstrate the horrific nature of the previous regime.
/ Friday, October 13, 2017
For many survivors of the Holocaust, persecution began in the hometown, where greed may have swayed perceived friends and neighbors to unspeakable actions. The inhabitance of formerly Jewish-owned apartments by non-Jewish tenants in the early 1940s, specifically in Paris, provides a strong case study of this phenomenon and the basis of a research project developed by Eric Le Bourhis of the Institute for Political Sciences, Nanterre (France).
/ Monday, October 16, 2017
There are no certain guides for rebuilding a society in the aftermath of systematic violence and genocide against one of its populations and its culture. Nevertheless, some societies address their histories more effectively than others, as found by Anika Walke, a German expat working as an assistant professor of History at Washington University in St. Louis.
/ Wednesday, October 18, 2017
Twelve years after the last federally operated Indian Residential School closed in 1996, the government of Canada apologized to the system’s survivors. They’d been put through so much they hadn’t deserved, from forced removals from their families and communities to deprivations of food, their ancestral languages, adequate sanitation; from forced labor and adherence to the Christian faith to physical abuse.
/ Thursday, October 19, 2017
Archaeology is like a protracted police investigation, wherein your evidence is precious because it is sparing and you’re lucky if you have a lot of witnesses. Caroline Sturdy Colls, an associate professor of Forensic Archaeology and Genocide Investigation at Staffordshire and founder of their Centre of Archaeology, knows this with certainty, having long worked in both the fields of genocide research and homicide investigation.
/ Friday, October 20, 2017
Event reconstruction can be an enormous undertaking – consider the millions spent by producers on costuming and sets for films and theatrical productions; the years of research and interviewing done by the authors of biographies and history books. Still, a new sort of reconstruction is on the rise now –virtual reality, for which users don goggles to view storyworlds developed by videographers, directors, programmers and sometimes researchers and historians.
/ Monday, October 23, 2017
Though USC Shoah Foundation runs in 13-year-old Sydney Gordon’s veins – her dad Mark Gordon is a member of its Next Generation Council and her grandmother Ita Gordon has been an indexer and researcher there since the foundation’s inception in 1994 – Sydney admitted she was hesitant to choose it as her bat mitzvah project at first.
/ Thursday, October 26, 2017
Despite living in Kiev her entire life, Oksana Ishchenko (right in photo) had never been to the site of the Babi Yar massacre in Ukraine, on the same side of the Dnieper river. In fact, before she was invited to train to give a Babi Yar IWalk – an educational program that put on a walk around the ravine guided by testimony clips from the Visual History Archive – this year, Ishchenko hadn’t learned very much about Babi Yar.
/ Monday, October 30, 2017
Grand View University is a liberal arts college in Des Moines, Iowa, with a student body of about 2,000. At such a small school, said its student body president Kendall Antle, it’s true: everybody seems to know everybody. But the small-town feel does come with its disadvantages. “One major issue we face is apathy,” Antle said. “You have cliques. People have a tendency to stay with whom they know and work with whom they know.”
/ Thursday, November 2, 2017
Just a couple weeks after attending USC Shoah Foundation’s Intercollegiate Diversity Congress (IDC) Summit, DePauw University Student Body President Erika Killion already has a plan for incorporating testimony clips and other USC Shoah Foundation educational resources into campus activities.
/ Monday, November 6, 2017
Fresh off of USC Shoah Foundation’s Intercollegiate Diversity Congress (IDC) Summit, Memphis University Student Body Vice President Kevyanna Rawls has some new expectations for her school. With testimony clips and other USC Shoah Foundation educational resources gleaned from the Summit, she’ll have plenty with which to make an impact.
/ Thursday, November 9, 2017
Among the student leaders from across the country who attended USC Shoah Foundation’s inaugural Intercollegiate Diversity Congress (IDC) Summit in October were two representatives from USC itself. One was Kara Watkins-Chow, who came away from the summit with new ideas and insight to take back to her role as president of the Queer & Ally Student Association.
/ Wednesday, November 15, 2017
A month after USC Shoah Foundation’s Intercollegiate Diversity Congress (IDC) Summit, Georgia State University Student Government Executive Vice President Jesse Calixte is still buzzing with ideas on how to make his university, the fourth most diverse in the country, more inclusive for all its students. Armed with testimony clips and other USC Shoah Foundation educational tools he obtained during the Summit, Calixte will have plenty with which to make an impact. “Going to this summit was one of my best decisions so far as a student leader,” Calixte said.
/ Tuesday, November 28, 2017
After two years of cursory research and interest, Martin Gruber was able to start a full-time job as USC Shoah Foundation’s 2017 Austrian Holocaust Memorial Service intern this October, one entire year early. And he couldn’t be more pleased.
Austria / Thursday, November 30, 2017
About a month after USC Shoah Foundation’s Intercollegiate Diversity Congress (IDC) Summit, Georgia College Student Government Association Senator Jessica Kleinman is still abuzz with ideas for positive change on her campus inspired by the Institute. And with testimony clips and other USC Shoah Foundation education resources at her ready, she’ll have abundant opportunities to make an impact.
/ Friday, December 8, 2017
We at USC Shoah Foundation are saddened to hear of the passing of our beloved friend, Holocaust survivor and renowned artist Alice Lok Cahana, who passed away on November 28 at age 88. Through her internationally acclaimed artwork, writings, and public speaking, Alice put forth a message to the world that both memorialized those who perished during the Holocaust and celebrated the strength of the human spirit.
/ Monday, December 11, 2017
Davina Pardo is a determined woman. For two years, the Emmy award-winning filmmaker had reached out to USC Shoah Foundation and Conscience Display, asking again and again for access to create a documentary about the New Dimensions in Testimony program. A native Canadian residing in Brooklyn, Pardo was no stranger to grappling with memories of mass murder. She had previously spent time in Rwanda filming a documentary about the 1994 genocide.
/ Friday, January 12, 2018
Not long ago, Holocaust survivor Anita Lasker-Wallfisch met in a hotel restaurant in Germany with a man named Niklas Frank, whose father was a German war criminal. They’d both been invited to appear together to speak to history students. While preparing at the restaurant, Lasker-Wallfisch and Frank were interrupted by a man who approached their table and complained they were “spoiling the pleasant atmosphere with all this talk of Auschwitz.”
/ Tuesday, February 13, 2018
Lucía Samayoa was born in Guatemala, and, after moving away at age 6, was schooled in various countries throughout Latin America. But it wasn’t really until last year, when she started working at Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation (FAFG) in Guatemala City, that the 30-year-old really gained a deeper understanding of the genocide that killed roughly 200,000 civilians – mainly indigenous Mayans – at the hands of the Guatemalan military in the early 1980s.
fafg / Wednesday, March 14, 2018
A Rohingya refugee’s account of her last days at home The Rohingya are a predominantly Muslim ethnic minority who have lived in Myanmar for hundreds of years but were effectively stripped of their citizenship by the Myanmar government (then known as Burma) and made stateless in 1982. A campaign of genocidal violence that began in August 2017 has pushed some 650,000 ethnic Rohingya from Myanmar to Bangladesh, where they live in what is now the largest refugee camp in the world.
/ Tuesday, April 3, 2018
cagr / Friday, October 11, 2019

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