One feature of her research is examining the role of the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive interviews in the construction of social memory of the Holocaust in the Soviet Jewish community and more widely in the post-Soviet society. During her month-long residency at the Center, Rebrova examined some of the USC Shoah Foundation’s institutional records about the selection, training, and methodology of interviewers in Russia.

The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research organized a symposium in the Fall to honor the work of leading Holocaust scholar David Cesarani from Great Britain, who died just weeks after being named by the USC Shoah Foundation the inaugural Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence. These are the remarks made by Rob Rozett at the event.

USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research staff will be traveling around the world this summer to host academic workshops about the Visual History Archive.

UNESCO’s push is part of a wider effort to address rising incidents of antisemitic events, which in recent years have ranged from online hate speech to physical violence.

The foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” (German acronym EVZ) is hosting an international workshop on the use of Holocaust survivor testimonies in education January 9-11.

(For directions, click here.)

At UNESCO’s Paris headquarters on Jan. 27, USC Shoah Foundation Finci-Viterbi Executive Director Stephen Smith will host a panel discussion following a screening of “Who Will Write Our History,” a documentary by Director Roberta Grossman and Executive Producer Nancy Spielberg that chronicles a covert effort by a group of resistance fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto who amassed an archive of documents that would later shed light on the Nazi atrocities that occurred there.

Raíssa Alonso is the 2022-2023 Margee and Douglas Greenberg Research Fellow at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research. She is a PhD candidate in Social History at the University of São Paulo in Brazil.

Program assisting faculty members.

USC Shoah Foundation today mourns the loss of a close friend, George Weiss, a longtime volunteer with the Institute and a Holocaust survivor who endured homelessness and life on the run as a young child separated from his parents in both France and Belgium during the war. He was 87. Weiss was a familiar and beloved presence at the offices of the Institute, stopping in every week to curate and work with clips of video testimony from the Visual History Archive, which contains 55,000 life stories of survivors and witnesses to the Holocaust and other genocides.

Today Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, the nonprofit organization that videotapes the firsthand testimonies of Holocaust survivors and other witnesses and make them accessible for educational purposes, opened a rare collection of Sinti and Roma Holocaust survivor testimonies at the Dokumentations und Kulturzentrum Deutscher Sinti und Roma (Documentation and Culture Centre of the German Sinti and Roma) in Heidelberg.

We are sorry to hear about the recent passing of Jim Sanders, who wrote a book chronicling his experience liberating Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Sanders was recognized by USC Shoah Foundation at its 2012 Ambassadors for Humanity gala, and he gave testimony to the Institute’s Visual History Archive.

Los Angeles, March 26, 2015 –  Echoes and Reflections, a comprehensive Holocaust education program that provides professional development and an array of resources for middle and high school teachers, is marking its 10th anniversary in 2015 with a strong trail of success behind it and ambitious goals for the future.

To honor this remarkable man and visionary scholar, the Institute gratefully re-posts his profile below. During the brief week that Harry spent with us here in Los Angeles this past July as our inaugural Rutman Teaching Fellow, he managed to touch and inspire all of our staff and friends of the Institute who worked with him and who heard his public lecture.

Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Yom HaShoah as it’s known in Hebrew, commemorates and honors the victims and survivors of the Holocaust. This year, people around the world will remember the victims of the Holocaust April 23- 24, 2017.

As a lawyer at the Nuremberg Trials, Harriet Zetterberg made breakthrough discoveries. But as the only woman on the prosecutorial staff, she had to look on as male members of the team presented her work.

“How the Holocaust’s Jewish Calendars Bear Witness” Alan Rosen (Recipient of the 2020 Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research) April 21, 2021

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.

Christopher R. Browning (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) 2018 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence “Holocaust History and Survivor Testimony: The Case of the Starachowice Factory Slave Labor Camp” March 29, 2018

On Tuesday, April 19, Celina Biniaz and Edith Umugiraneza will read poetry they’ve written about their experiences during the Holocaust and the Rwandan Genocide, respectively, in “When Memories Unfold: Poetry After Genocide.”

Eighty-one years ago today Nazi soldiers and their collaborators committed one of the largest single massacres of the Holocaust with the murder of close to 33,000 Jews in the Babyn Yar ravine in Ukraine. The site of the atrocity on the outskirts of the capital Kyiv is now a memorial that people anywhere can visit with a new Virtual IWalk released by USC Shoah Foundation earlier this year. 

Only a day after the University of Southern California announced that it would conduct a three-day test to move all classes online, which soon turned into a permanent arrangement until the end of Spring semester, my colleague and I gave our last in-person introduction to the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive to a USC class. Perhaps serendipitously, one of the topics discussed in this class was physical health.

The Institute mourns the passing of members of our community in 2020, including survivors who have given testimony Hanna Pankowsky, Dario Gabbai, Anneliese Nossbaum, Éva Székely,

Auschwitz, the final destination of Jewish people from across Europe destined to be murdered as a part of the Nazi genocide of the Jews. Auschwitz, a place that housed prisoners of many religions, persuasions, minorities and nationalities, but whose evil reputation is seared onto our collective conscience because the five gas chambers at Birkenau were there for one reason only - to devour the lives of 960,000 Jews. Auschwitz, which has evolved into a universal symbol of man's inhumanity to man – and indeed it does remind us just how cruel human beings can be.

As Hannah, in the novel The Devil's Arithmetic, needed to have a first-hand experience to fully understand the Holocaust; my students must be equipped with first-hand information, too. While they cannot "time travel" as Hannah does, they can hear from survivors to have a greater understanding of the Holocaust.

​We Share the Same Sky weaves together the stories of these two young women--Hana as a refugee who remains one step ahead of the Nazis at every turn, and Rachael, whose insatiable curiosity to touch the past guides her into the lives of countless strangers, bringing her love and tragic loss. Throughout the course of her twenties, Hana's history becomes a guidebook for Rachael in how to live a life empowered by grief.

The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research hosted professors Marianne Hirsch (Columbia University) and Leo Spitzer (Dartmouth College), who gave a lecture based on their recently published book School Photos in Liquid Time: Reframing Difference.

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.

The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research and the International Institute for Holocaust Research, Yad Vashem wish to announce the third joint workshop for advanced PhD candidates working on Holocaust topics.

Director of USC Shoah Foundation’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research Wolf Gruner will moderate a panel at UCLA exploring the historical and cultural contexts of the works of Rabbi Joachim Prinz and composer Kurt Weill right before World War II.