From the spring 2014 issue of PastForward: French film director and documentarian Claude Lanzmann visited USC Shoah Foundation for the first time this December, bringing with him his latest film and a simple request for the future.
claude lanzmann, pastforward / Monday, August 25, 2014
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.
/ Saturday, April 8, 2023
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.
cagr / Wednesday, November 30, 2016
USC Shoah Foundation and the Maimonides Institute for Medicine, Ethics and the Holocaust are partnering to develop new and innovative educational programing on medical ethics and the Holocaust. The Holocaust marked a profound and sadistic deviation from traditional notions of medical ethics, with medical and scientific communities in the Third Reich actively participating in the labeling, persecution and eventual mass murder of millions deemed “unfit.”
/ Friday, July 30, 2021
The documentary Two Sides of Survival just landed Winner of Best Documentary Short at the Angeles Film Festival. Produced by USC Shoah Foundation, Two Sides of Survival brings together stories from the East and West, chronicling how Jews who fled the Nazis in Europe, and Chinese who were threatened by Japanese occupation, improbably found refuge close to one another in the 1930’s and during World War II.
film, documentary, nanjing, holocaust / Wednesday, September 1, 2021
USC Shoah Foundation announced a new partnership with Ancestry® to provide free access to searchable data from nearly 50,000 Jewish Holocaust survivor testimonies that are in the Visual History Archive® (VHA). “We are grateful that Ancestry is providing access to this initial set of metadata and enhancing the discoverability of our archive and this critically important history,” said Stephen Smith, Finci-Viterbi Executive Director at USC Shoah Foundation. Here’s how it works:
/ Wednesday, August 26, 2020
Survivors and their testimonies have been central to Holocaust research and memorial culture. Even before the end of the Shoah, survivor historians in parts of Eastern Europe liberated from Nazi occupation collected testimonies and conducted interviews with fellow survivors.
cagr, cfp / Friday, September 6, 2019
Bella Arnett (née Froman) was born on September 6, 1917 in Warsaw, Russian Empire (now Poland). She had three brothers and two sisters. Bella’s father, Chaim,was a shoikhet, performing the ritual slaughter of animals according to Jewish tradition. He observed Ger Hasidism and was a respected member of the local community. Before the war, Bella attended a Polish school and received Jewish education at home.
clip, female, jewish survivor / Thursday, January 23, 2014
Panama’s Jewish community is commemorating Yom HaShoah virtually this year with a week-long series of thematic Instagram posts that will integrate clips from USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive. In memory of the six million killed, Panama Friends of Yad Vashem coordinated a six-day campaign focused on survivor families in Panama, the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, and community commemorations of Yom HaShoah.
yom hashoah / Monday, April 20, 2020
Scholars from around the world will gather Friday and Saturday to discuss genocide resistance in the past and present at the third annual “Resisting the Path to Genocide” workshop. The workshop is free and open to the public.
genocide resistance, usc dornsife, wolf gruner, Stephen Smith / Tuesday, September 24, 2013
On the heels of USC Shoah Foundation’s new partnership with the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall to collect and preserve testimony of Nanjing Massacre survivors, the educational platform Facing History and Ourselves signed an agreement to integrate three of those testimonies into its own educational materials.
nanjing, nanjing survivor, education, teacher, teaching, testimony / Wednesday, December 18, 2013
Faculty stipends announced.
/ Friday, July 10, 2009
LOS ANGELES – April 26, 2017 – Scant attention has been paid to the key roles women played in the Nuremberg Trials that held Nazi perpetrators to account for their role in the Holocaust. This is the main focus of a dissertation by Diane Amann, associate dean at the University of Georgia School of Law. She will expand on her work in January 2018 when she comes as a fellow to conduct research at USC Shoah Foundation’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research at the University of Southern California.
/ Wednesday, April 26, 2017
Charlotte Kiechel, a Ph.D. candidate in Global History at Yale University, has been awarded the 2021-2022 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 Spring 2022 to conduct research related to her dissertation, which is entitled “The Politics of Comparison: Holocaust Memory and Visions of ‘Third World’ Suffering, 1950-1995.”
cagr / Monday, January 3, 2022
USC Shoah Foundation, Blavatnik Archive partner on adding soldiers’ narratives to searchable database. The project expands focus on veterans discussing their daily lives, Jewish experience before and during WWII.
interdisciplinary research week, soviet army, russia, Summer Research Fellowship for USC Faculty, Beth and Arthur Lev Student Research Fellowship / Friday, April 19, 2019
Freie Universität Berlin introduces multimedia archive project.
/ Tuesday, May 12, 2009
One night last week, Megan Maybray was panicking.A Holocaust survivor named Rita Ross was visiting her school, Kennett Middle School near Philadelphia, the next day, but Maybray was having trouble teaching her ESL students about the Holocaust. Her students are new arrivals to the United States and most know little English. Maybray had never really taught the Holocaust before and could tell that her previous attempt to introduce them to the basics had not had much of an impact.
/ Wednesday, April 29, 2015
USC Shoah Foundation today unveils a Dimensions in Testimony (DiT) interview with internationally celebrated author and concert pianist Mona Golabek. Published on the Institute’s award-winning IWitness page in honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, this is the inaugural DiT interactive experience to feature a second-generation (or ‘2G”) descendent of a Holocaust survivor.
/ Thursday, January 26, 2023
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.
cagr / Friday, July 7, 2023
If you’ve never heard of the 1945 Soviet film The Unvanquished, don’t worry: You’re not alone, and Olga Gershenson will talk about why that is at USC Shoah Foundation’s international conference in November.
/ Tuesday, August 19, 2014
A few weeks ago, USC Student Body President Rini Sampath posted on her Facebook page about incidents of hatred and intolerance on campus. A Saturday night after a USC football game, Sampath had been walking down USC’s Fraternity Row when a man leaned out his frat house window and hurled a racial epithet and a beverage cup at her.
usc, Tolerance, rini Sampath, discrimination, op-eds / Monday, October 19, 2015
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.
cagr / Wednesday, January 18, 2017
In his testimonial archived with the USC Shoah Foundation, George Weiss spoke to the dread and exile he endured as a child during Nazi Party rule. This chronicle is about the man who sculptured all he lived, imagined and embodied.
cagr / Tuesday, February 9, 2021
The ethics of studying Holocaust medical experiments will be the topic of conversation at the first-ever Zygo Student Lunchtime Series panel Friday at 12:30 p.m in USC Doheny Memorial Library room G28.
event, holocaust, wolf gruner / Wednesday, February 26, 2014
Learning from eyewitnesses of some of history’s darkest moments, educators strive to teach the power of decency and respect.
Trojam Family Magazine, Ivy Schamis, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Parkland, florida, iwitness / Thursday, November 1, 2018
As president of the Koret Foundation and chairman of Taube Philanthropies, Tad Taube has contributed millions to philanthropic causes around the world. But he says his dedication to USC Shoah Foundation is simply “a natural thing to do.” Taube and his parents fled Poland in 1939 and ultimately settled in Los Angeles. After getting his master’s in industrial engineering from Stanford, Taube was one of the creators of E-H Research Laboratories and began a career in real estate.
/ Thursday, October 10, 2013
Ian Zdanowicz is making the most out of his month at USC Shoah Foundation. Zdanowicz is the recipient of the Visiting PhD Fellowship from the USC Dornsife 2020 Genocide Resistance Research Cluster, which is led by USC Shoah Foundation executive director Stephen Smith and Wolf Gruener, Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies and Professor of History.
/ Monday, November 4, 2013
We are saddened to hear of the recent passing of Selma Engel, who, after becoming one of the few people to escape Sobibor death camp in Poland during the Holocaust, immediately began telling the world what she saw. She was 96.
Selma Engel, sobibor, obit, obituary, uprising / Thursday, December 13, 2018
Watch Alice Herz Sommer’s full testimony from the Visual History Archive as part of Comcast’s Days of Remembrance: PastFORWARD broadcast April 15-June 1, 2015.Perhaps no musical Holocaust survivor is more well-known and beloved than Alice Herz Sommer.
/ Friday, May 1, 2015
Auschwitz survivor Eva Kor will be in Los Angeles next week to film an interview for New Dimensions in Testimony, USC Shoah Foundation’s three-dimensional, interactive virtual encounter with Holocaust survivors.
ndt, New Dimensions in Testimony, eva kor, past is present / Wednesday, March 16, 2016

Pages