USC Shoah Foundation’s Immersive Innovations team headed to Mexico in March of this year to spend a week with Holocaust survivors Dolly and Julio Botton. The couple, who have been together for more than 50 years, were part of the Institute’s first collection of videotaped testimonies back in the 1990s.

10AM – 11AM PDT | 1PM - 2PM EDT Internationally acclaimed scholar and historian, Professor Yehuda Bauer, joins the Echoes & Reflections community from Israel for a special presentation on the Holocaust and other genocides. While the Holocaust is a unique historical event, the study of this history can inform the study of other mass atrocities. During this webinar, Professor Bauer will talk about similarities and differences between the Holocaust and other genocides, and what can be learned and applied from a study of the Holocaust to a study of other genocides.

This webinar features We Share The Same Sky, USC Shoah Foundation’s first podcast, which tells the personal story of a granddaughter’s decade-long journey to retrace her grandmother’s story of survival and the impact it has on her understanding of self and the present world.

Julia remembers her family's prewar life as nomadic Roma in Germany.

As the world shelters in place and struggles for justice, the arts are more important than ever. Join Visions and Voices as they kick off the 2020–21 academic year and their 15th season with a dynamic and inspirational evening of music, dance, spoken word, comedy, and more. This special event will amplify the role of the arts as a means of connection, resilience, healing, and social change. Attendees will also be invited to join the artists “backstage” for an epic virtual dance party starring you.

Past President of the American Academy of Pediatrics (2018) Colleen Kraft is best known for her advocacy for humane treatment of migrant children at the border. Her work to explain to the public the harms to young children caused by the “zero tolerance” policy, which included separation of children from parents, helped to mobilize advocates across the political spectrum to end this policy.

Scholar, activist, playwright, artist, and one of the original organizers of Black Lives Matter Funmilola Fagbamila will perform The Intersection: Woke Black Folk, her acclaimed one-woman stage play about the complexities of Black political identity and how humans navigate difference. The Intersection premiered at the Pan African Film and Arts Festival in Los Angeles in 2018 and has toured across the Netherlands, England, France, and Brazil.

Safer at Home is an online exhibition of objects from the ONE Archives Collection at the USC Libraries organized by its curator, Alexis Bard Johnson. Safer at Home is an invitation to examine the many facets of home as well as what safety means and looks like for LGBTQ populations—both past and present. The selected items resonate with and reflect on the idea of “safer at home.” They act as a mirror—bringing the past into the present and offering perspective on what is happening today.

Asian communities in Los Angeles abound with diversity. A multitude of ethnicities and nationalities from across the Asian continent are present here. Residents have sought fresh new opportunities, arriving as refugees, economic migrants, students, or professionals. In celebration of these communities, USC PAM presents seven dynamic female contemporary artists who embody the vitality of our city’s Asian populations. Each of these artists speak to the fluidity of an individual’s sense of place and self.

This interactive, 65-minute comedic performance mashes up campaign rallies, church revivals, and solo theater shows to uncover the history of voting, what it means to run for local office, and the impact artists can have on democracy.

There are few artists who possess as sophisticated an understanding of the music business, the entertainment industry, and racial politics in America as Chuck D, and even fewer speakers who can command an audience like he does while breaking it down. Sharing his powerful experiences, observations, and advice, the leader and co-founder of the legendary rap group Public Enemy, author of two critically acclaimed books, political activist, publisher, radio host, and producer will address politics, rap and soul music, race, technology, and more.

Join us for a livestream discussion with Sheryl Cababa (VP of Strategy, Substantial) & Jenna Leventhal (Deputy Director of Education, USC Shoah Foundation) via Zoom. USC Shoah Foundation collaborated with Substantial to design and build IWalk, a digital educational platform to bring in-person historical locations to life. We will discuss:

From visiting family in China during summer breaks growing up, I became acutely aware of the devastation and suffering that occurred during the Japanese occupation of our hometown of Nanjing. Museums, movies, television programs, and commemorative art kept the Nanjing Massacre alive in public memory. But what I also noticed, from visits to museums, shuffling through television channels, and discussions with family, was the seeming absence of Chinese resistance.

Lucy Sun will be a senior in the Fall 2020 semester. She is majoring in History and minoring in Psychology and Law.

In this talk, Chad Gibbs will discuss how Jewish prisoners created what he terms “spaces of resistance” at Treblinka and how studying these locations can provide revelations about the roles of women prisoners in resistance.

An online lecture by Allison Somogyi (Yale University and University of Southern California) 2019-2020 USC-Yale Postdoctoral Research Fellow Organized by the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research Supported by the USC Libraries Collection Convergence Initiative 

Join Lesly Culp and Sedda Antekelian as they introduce Mindful Explorations on IWitness—10-minute testimony-based activities designed to be taught daily—so you can make social-emotional learning a stabilizing presence in the tumult of your students’ lives.

Alan Auyeung pulled on a pair of latex gloves and a N95 face mask. For good measure, he placed a pair of protective goggles over his eyes too. A trip to the supermarket? In these Covid-19 times, it could have been but, in fact, Auyeung was preparing for a task of quite a different nature: saving the testimonies of Holocaust survivors, whose eye witness accounts of Nazi atrocities were at risk of being eaten away by mold.

Rohingya survivor Shafika Begum remembers the 2017 deaths of her four best friends at the hands of the Burmese military.

Three years ago today, August 25, 2017, the Myanmar army coordinated and implemented a genocidal attack on Rohingya communities and villages across Myanmar’s Rakhine state.

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:

USC Shoah Foundation—working with on-site partners National Historical Museums in Sweden and the Institution for Jewish Culture in Sweden—recently began filming two Swedish-language Dimensions in Testimony interviews in Stockholm, Sweden utilizing innovative social distancing and filming techniques.

Join USC Shoah Foundation Finci-Viterbi Executive Director Stephen D. Smith and special guests for a webinar to learn more about tracing family history through Ancestry® and JewishGen.org as they unlock the power of testimony metadata.

Rachel Zaretsky is the 2020 Beth and Arthur Lev Student Research Fellow at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. Ms. Zaretsky just completed the first year of her MFA in Art at the USC Roski School of Art and Design. She earned her BFA in Visual and Critical Studies from The School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York, and her art practice takes the form of performance, video installation and photography. She has created past artistic responses to the Miami Beach Holocaust memorial and to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Berlin.