The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research invites research proposals from USC undergraduate students for its 2018 Summer Research Fellowships.

The IWitness Video Challenge is a 21st century skill builder - teaching students how to use digital tools such as video editors to craft multimedia essays. Most importantly, the challenge provides students the opportunity to positively enhance their digital citizenship as they network and collaborate with others to deal with real world problems.

Drawing on USC Shoah Foundation oral history videos, personal papers, and other sources, Dr. Diane Marie Amann's lecture situates stories of the unsung women who played vital roles at Nuremberg in the context of the Nuremberg trials themselves, international law, and the postwar global society. Diane Marie Amann is the inaugural 2017-2018 Breslauer, Rutman and Anderson Research Fellow.

This lecture is part of the series "Hidden Archives - Public Sturggles: Events Commemorating the 75th Anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising." Presented by Doheny Memorial Library and co-sponsored by the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research.

Inaugural Breslauer, Rutman & Anderson Research Fellow Diane Marie Amann gave a public lecture at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research about her research on the little-known women involved in the Nuremberg Trials.

Jean-Marc Dreyfus, PhD, Reader in Holocaust Studies in the History department at the University of Manchester (United Kingdom) has been awarded the 2018-2019 Center Research Fellowship.

Christopher R. Browning, Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has been chosen as the 2017-2018 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence.

This series will highlight one teaching activity per day for 10 days, pairing eyewitness testimony with standards-aligned lessons that transform learning.

We are saddened to learn of the recent passing of Arkadii Vaispapir, one of few people ever to have survived the Sobibór death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland during the Holocaust. He was 96.

The risk of the Holocaust is not that it will be forgotten, but that it will be embalmed and surrounded by monuments and used to absolve all future sins.   - Zygmunt Bauman 2018 Polish-Israeli Crisis: History, Trauma, and Politics of Cultural Memory The future of Polish-Israeli relations can be driven by compassion and forgiveness, or a retreat behind walls of fossilized antisemitism, essentialist prejudice, nationalistic egotism, and fear. 1968-2018

Maria Zalewska is a Ph.D. candidate in Cinema and Media Studies at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, a 2016-2018 Mellon Ph.D. Fellow in the Digital Humanities and an affiliated scholar of the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. Her research interests include cinematic representations of the Holocaust; documentary film; national and transnational modes and media of memorialization; digital humanities; politics of technologized memory; place and space in cinema; history as film/film as history; and political economy of film.

The future of Polish-Israeli relations can be driven by compassion and forgiveness, or a retreat behind walls of fossilized antisemitism, essentialist prejudice, nationalistic egotism, and fear.

In this activity, students will examine the impact that personal stories can have in inspiring others to action. They will listen and reflect on genocide survivor testimonies, discuss the concept of leadership and form belief statements about how they can become leaders in their communities.

A film screening of Pamela Yates's documentary 500 Years. Presented in partnership with the USC School of Cinematic Arts. Co-sponsored by the USC Gould Law School's Center for Law, History and Culture. 

Even absent this current era of “alternative facts” and “fake news,” the new Polish law making it a crime to point out Poland’s complicity in the Holocaust would be alarming.  But that it is occurring in today’s climate of demagoguery, heightened nationalism and ethnic tension – an unholy trio that threatens to metastasize on a global scale – is a troubling development. Poland’s effort has come under attack by Israel and stewards of Holocaust memory.

Presented in partnership with the USC Doheny Memorial Library.

A public lecture by Mélanie Péron (University of Pennsylvania) 2016 Rutman Fellow for Research and Teaching This event will take place at the University of Pennsylvania.

Over the course of their stay, the team built six IWitness activities focused on peace building in Rwanda. The first to go online will focus on Propaganda and Social Cohesion, which will be available for teachers and students by Tuesday, Feb. 13.

We are sorry to hear about the recent passing of Jewish Holocaust survivor Margot Schlesinger. The Chicago resident was 99. Schlesinger gave her testimony to USC Shoah Foundation in 1995. Born Maria Miriam Wind, on July 24, 1918, she was raised in Berlin. In her interview, she talks about life before the war, and living in a ghetto, before being sent to the Plaszow concentration camp, where she was put to work in Oskar Schindler’s nearby factory. She was among a group of women who were accidentally sent to the Auschwitz death camp.

Los Angeles, February. 13, 2018 – “The Last Goodbye,” a virtual-reality film that brings the viewer inside a Nazi concentration camp with Holocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter, won a top prize at the 2018 Lumiere Awards hosted Monday by The Advanced Imaging Society. The film was honored with the Creative Arts Award, VR – Documentary Jury Prize, at the awards ceremony held at the Warner Bros. Studio in Hollywood.

The film was honored with the Creative Arts Award, VR – Documentary Jury Prize, at the awards ceremony held at the Warner Bros. Studio in Hollywood.

February is Black History Month, a time to acknowledge and celebrate the central role African Americans have made in the United States. In honor of this special time, we invite educators and students to remember history in their classrooms, utilizing this year’s thematic lens, “African Americans in Times of War.”

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.”

Executive Director Stephen D. Smith introduces our work in the area of virtual reality with a look at "The Last Goodbye," a VR short featuring Holocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter as he takes you on an intimate journey through the Majdanek concentration camp.

Letisha Young joined the Shoah Foundation in July of 2017 as the Program Manager of Administrative Programs.  She oversees Human Resources and Facilities for the Foundation.  Prior to joining the Foundation, she worked as a HR Analyst for the Dornsife Business office for 2 years.  Letisha received her Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration with emphasis in Human Resources from California State University, Northridge.  She also holds two HR Certifications. (Professional in Human Resources- PHR and Society of Human Resources SHRM-CP).

Mark Weicht is a Video Archivist and Post Production Specialist. He also has fabricated many items designed for use with several DIT projects and exhibits. Prior to joining the staff at the Shoah Foundation, Mark worked at Post Production facilities around the Los Angeles area including Herzog and Company where they won 4 Primetime Emmy's for "Gettysburg (2011)".

Svetlana Ushakova provides the service of research, annotation, and evaluation to the Dimensions in Testimony program. In 2014-2018, she worked at USC Shoah Foundation as an indexer and research assistant. Before she moved to the USA, she worked for ten years as a researcher at an academic institution in Russia and has several publications. Svetlana received her doctorate in Russian History from Novosibirsk State University, Russia, and her master in Library and Information Science from San Jose State University.

Edith Umugiraneza joined the USC Shoah Foundation in 2009 as a consultant and later became an indexer. Before that, she lived in Canada for 10 years. Edith graduated from College Sainte-Foy with a degree in social work and got a bachelor’s degree from Laval University in multidisciplinary studies. Edith has worked for several organizations and the government especially in the field of integration and adaptation of immigrants.

By collecting clips of testimony to construct a "GeoStory" - a map and timeline with videos - students can discover how changes in time and place shape history.

At the exact moment a former student was destroying lives at Stoneman Douglas High School, a group of students inside a classroom was studying ways to make the world a better place. These were students in a Holocaust history class, where they were exploring the 1936 Olympics in an IWitness learning activity to teach them about compassion and respect, and about the perils of living a life filled with hate and violence.