Today we mourn the murder of eight people in Georgia that includes six Asian women — and we are appalled by the increased acts of anti-Asian hate and violence across the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic.   The horrific events in Georgia underscore the importance of working to counter anti-Asian racism. At the outset of the pandemic last March, USC Pacific Asia Museum experienced increased acts of anti-Asian racism that spurred discussions about the need for a campus-wide initiative to confront the rising tide of identity-based hatred.   

We lost a giant in the fight against hate yesterday - Karen Wells, educator from Midland High School in Pleasant Plains, Arkansas, Discovery Education DEN leader, and IWitness Master Educator and Teaching Fellow. The Institute joins her students, Discovery Education colleagues, educators worldwide, friends and her family in mourning her loss.

Watch a virtual panel discussion on the topic of Hate speech and the prevention of genocide through education hosted by UNESCO, jointly with the Permanent Delegation of Rwanda to UNESCO. Finci-Viterbi Executive Director Stephen Smith will be joined by many experts from around the world during this virtual panel discussion marking International Day of Reflection on the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda.

Presented by The Miller Center for Community Protection & Resilience, Rutgers University, International March of the Living and Maimonides Institute for Medicine, Ethics and the Holocaust, in cooperation with USC Shoah Foundation.

Among the Holocaust survivors participating are those who survived due to the selfless acts of medical professionals. Participants in the Virtual March from across the globe were filmed using innovative 3D technology so they appear to be marching along the traditional March of the Living route at Auschwitz – Birkenau.

Join Ohio Governor Mike DeWine as he hosts the 41st Annual Governor’s Holocaust Commemoration.

Explore the ways that our lives can be shaped by the experiences of our ancestors through the power of firsthand testimonies.

Join Sedda Antekelian, Educator and Outreach Specialist at USC Shoah Foundation, and filmmaker and broadcaster Carla Garapedian for this webinar as they explore the legacy of the Armenian Genocide.

In this talk, Lauren Cantillon explores the tensions and textures of emotions present in Jewish women’s personal memory narratives of sexual(ized) violence during the Holocaust. Drawing on interviews from the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, she highlights some of the numerous Jewish women who shared their stories within the context of a Holocaust testimony interview.

Yad Vashem has collected approximately 4.8 million pages of testimony that restore the personal identities and record the brief life stories of the six million Jews who perished at the hands of the Nazis. In honor of Yom HaShoah—Israel’s Day of Holocaust Remembrance—this webinar, led by a Yad Vashem educator, will highlight survivor testimony from Echoes & Reflections, and pages of testimony from Yad Vashem’s archive, to examine the importance of memory and how it serves us and future generations, to create a better world. This webinar is open to teachers and their students.

Holocaust education is a powerful pathway to commemorate and educate about past genocides and events occurring in the world today such as human rights violations. To honor Genocide Awareness Month, teachers and their students are invited to participate in this interactive webinar, and engage in activities from the Echoes & Reflections Teaching about Genocide Resource, which includes video testimonies from witnesses to genocide, and other primary sources.

A conversation featuring Salphi Ghazarian, Umit Kurt, Beth Meyerowitz, and Michael Renov Moderated by Peter Mancall

Liberation75's Student Education Days are running from April 7-8, 2021, beginning at 6am PST on April 7! Liberation75 has brought together over 15 of the world's leading Holocaust education organizations, including USC Shoah Foundation, to teach your students the important lessons of the Holocaust.

After the UNESCO event “From Hate Speech to Genocide: Lessons from the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda,”  USC Shoah Foundation’s Kori Street continues the conversation with Freddy Mutanguha, Survivor and Executive Director of the Aegis Trust and Tali Nates, Director of the Johannesburg Holocaust and Genocide Centre.

Watch a virtual panel discussion on the topic of Hate speech and the prevention of genocide through education hosted by UNESCO, jointly with the Permanent Delegation of Rwanda to UNESCO. Finci-Viterbi Executive Director Stephen Smith will be joined by many experts from around the world during this virtual panel discussion marking International Day of Reflection on the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda.

Betty Grebenschikoff and Ana María Wahrenberg were inseparable best friends before the Holocaust. Separated when their families each fled the Nazis, they each believed the other had perished. They were reunited just a few short months ago thanks to a combination of international partnerships, astute research, and the power of survivor testimony.

“Challenging the Shame Paradigm: Jewish Women’s Narratives of Sexual(ized) Violence During the Holocaust” Lauren Cantillon (PhD candidate in the Department of Culture, Media & Creative Industries at King’s College London, UK) 2020-2021 Robert J. Katz Research Fellow in Genocide Studies March 25, 2021

Twenty-one-years after my grandmother recorded her testimony with USC Shoah Foundation, I teamed up with the Institute to create a podcast about my own decade-long journey to retrace her war story. It would be the first-ever narrative podcast to be based around survivor testimony. After years of research, criss-crossing international borders, living in stranger’s homes, and harmonizing history with the politics of today, I began to sit with her voice. “I always felt very guilty,” she told the interviewer about her survival.

To announce the We Are The Tree of Life performing arts project, we are screening a short video that showcases some of the art created during the Holocaust and features Dr. Edith Eva Eger’s life story as a dancer.

This workshop invites middle and high school educators to learn best practices for teaching film with audiovisual testimony of survivors and witnesses of the Armenian Genocide using multimedia resources across IWitness to contextualize key themes and events addressed in the film The Promise.

In this event, the Center's two student research fellows will discuss the testimony-based research they conducted during Summer 2020. Exploring testimonies from the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive's Nanjing Massacre collection, Lucy Sun (USC undergraduate student, History major, Psychology and Law minor) researched the resistance of women during the Nanjing Massacre.

Cambodian genocide survivor, Theary Seng, reflects on the power of anger and the difference between anger and hate.

Rosalina Tuyuc encourages the youth to value life and act as the protagonists for the future.

USC Shoah Foundation’s Teaching Film with Testimony is a multi-faceted interdisciplinary program that offers educators (K-16) best practices and access to a suite of educational resources for using both film and audiovisual testimony from survivors and witnesses to genocide to support student learning.

In 1985, when Dr. Sharon Aroian-Poiser was a graduate student, she accompanied her grandfather to Washington D.C., to a conference commemorating the 70th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. Between 1915 and 1918, the Turkish government systematically expelled or massacred an estimated 1.5 million Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire. Aroian-Poiser watched as elderly survivors at the conference rose to tell their stories before microphones and video recorders, many of them for the first time. It was, in fact, the first time that Aroian-Poiser learned that her grandfather was a survivor.