Yiddish Poet and Holocaust survivor Rikva Basman Ben-Hayim died March 22, 2023, at 98. In her March 1996 testimony, Holocaust survivor Adela Bay, who was in Kaiserwald concentration camp with Rivka, remembers the opening lines of Rivka's poem reflecting on the humanity that still remains through a person's eyes, despite the inhumanity of a shaved head and wearing a prison uniform.

As the Nazis assumed power in Germany in 1933, many artists and intellectuals opposed to the regime sought refuge in Latin America, particularly in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico.

Wonder Woman star Gal Gadot opened her Los Angeles home to friends and family earlier this week to commemorate Yom HaShoah by hosting an intimate conversation with Holocaust survivor Celina Biniaz, the youngest female on Oskar Schindler’s famed list.

USC Shoah Foundation is saddened by the passing of Alan Moskin, a Jewish veteran of the U.S. Armed Forces who, at the age of 18, helped liberate Gunskirchern, a subcamp of Mauthausen Concentration Camp, in May 1945. Later in life, Alan became a tireless advocate for Holocaust education and remembrance at schools, veterans’ groups, and in the media, speaking with candor about the horror he witnessed at the camp, the brutality of combat, and the bigotry he encountered in the U.S. Army. 

Stephen Kalmar, an activist who fled Austria in the 1930’s and emigrated to Mexico with his wife in 1940.

Heinz Geggel was Secretary of the Freies Deutschland anti-Nazi group in Cuba during World War Two.

Sedda Antekelian, a member of USC Shoah Foundation’s education team, never knew her own great grandmother had recorded testimony about surviving the Armenian Genocide. Hearing her great grandmother’s voice for the first time has brought Sedda closer to family, filled in gaps about her own history, and opened even more questions.

In this keynote from March 28, 2023, in recognition of the Mickey Shapiro Endowed Chair in Holocaust Education Research at the University of Southern California, distinguished scholar Mary Helen Immordino-Yang suggests that the foundation of the future of education is rooted in story – stories that help us care.

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.

This event will be rescheduled for the Fall.

In this clip from his 2019 interview, recorded for the Visual History Archive, WWII veteran and liberator Alan Moskin speaks of the importance of giving testimony. Alan Moskin passed away in 2023 at the age of 96. Read our tribute to him.

In this presentation, Elyse Semerdjian outlines the earliest Armenian pilgrimages to the killing fields of Dayr al-Zur in the Syrian Desert. It is there that Armenians interacted with the remains of Armenians murdered during the Armenian Genocide (1915-1918) in acts of remembrance. Semerdjian discusses the origins of the now-destroyed Armenian Genocide Memorial in Dayr al-Zur and the ritual and collection habits of pilgrims that enact what she calls bone memory.

In 2018, USC Shoah Foundation launched the Last Chance Testimony Initiative to address requests from survivors who, for complex and often very personal reasons, could not come forward in the 1990s. Since the start of COVID, the foundation has received more than 400 requests from survivors to record their testimonies. We believe there are thousands more who want to tell their stories. The global pandemic has accelerated our race against time. The last chance is upon us.

USC Shoah Foundation this fall launches a new Antisemitism Lecture Series to showcase to wider audiences the latest scholarly research on the topic and convene some of the leading scholars in the field.  

In this blog, the Center's 2022-2023 Greenberg Research Fellow Raíssa Alonso reflects on resistance and the roots of her research. 

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.

Robson Bello visited the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research in March 2023 as a Visiting Scholar. He earned his Bachelor's, Master's, and PhD degrees in Social History at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. His dissertation is entitled "The Playground of the Past: Videogames and the Reification of Memory, Play, and the American West" ("O Playground do Passado: Videogame e a reificação da Memória, do Lúdico e do Oeste Americano").

In this blog, Center visiting scholar Robson Bello discusses his focus on play during his month of research. 

In this talk, Renana Keydar and Eitan Wagner examine the meeting point between testimony and computation, the new possibilities inherent in such an encounter and the challenges and risks involved. They introduce the new avenues for listening to the multitude of testimonies in the archives afforded by the development of advanced computational tools. The talk presents a computational model of "distant listening," which is motivated by the moral commitment to the integrity of each testimony while simultaneously approaching the multiplicity of testimonies as such.

USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of Marta (Weiss) Wise, who was ten years old when she was liberated from Auschwitz, having endured the medical torture of Josef Mengele, along with her sister, Eva (Weiss) Slonim. She was 88. Marta and Eva were among a group of children pictured in a photograph—a still from a film shot by a Soviet cameraman soon after the liberation of Auschwitz—that became an iconic image of the horrors of the death camp where nearly one million Jews were killed during the Holocaust.

Marta describes an instance of Holocaust denial which occurred at a school where she spoke.

USC Shoah Foundation in partnership with Aspen Film cordially invite you to a special screening of Remember This starring Academy Award-nominee David Strathairn

The USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research will cohost the 17th biennial Lessons & Legacies conference, which will take place at Claremont McKenna College and the University of Southern California from November 14 to November 17, 2024. Organized and sponsored by the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University (HEFNU) in partnership with host universities, the biennial Lessons & Legacies of the Holocaust Conference (popularly known as Lessons & Legacies) is the premier international scholarly gathering in Holocaust Studies.

The USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research is delighted to announce the upcoming publication of the book Resisters: How Ordinary Jews Fought Persecution in Hitler's Germany. Authored by Center Founding Director Wolf Gruner, the book will be published by Yale University Press on August 29, 2023.

The USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of Thomas Buergenthal, one of the youngest known survivors of Auschwitz, who later became an esteemed human rights attorney and United States representative on the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Thomas passed away on May 29, 2023, in Miami, Florida. He was 89.