Students learn the incredible true story of a group of Ukrainian Jews who hid in underground caves during the Holocaust in the IWitness Information Quest activity that ties into the 2013 film No Place on Earth.

The pages of my copy of The Giver are totally worn. The cover has been folded and there are subsequent pages with the same type of tear. On the bottom right corner is an advertisement for a special low price of $2.99 and in the upper right corner there is the embedded medal of the John Newbery Prize, one of the most prestigious prizes in literature.

Highlights of the 2016 Master Teacher program in Budapest. A USC Shoah Foundation’s professional development initiative, Master Teacher (formerly Teaching with Testimony) is a two-year program that incorporates workshops, mentoring, and community building to prepare educators to search for and utilize testimony from the Visual History Archive, as well as other digital learning tools such as IWitness.

Historian and filmmaker Christian Delage (Institut D’Histoire Du Temps Présent, Paris) gave a public lecture at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research focusing on analysis of different forms of testimony — in war crimes trials, oral history repositories, and documentary - and his recent project collecting interviews about the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris.

Join us for a virtual commemoration and lecture featuring a keynote address from USC Professor of History Wolf Gruner, the Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies and Founding Director of the Center for Advanced Genocide Research at USC Shoah Foundation. Register Now

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.

In 2022, USC Shoah Foundation integrated first testimonies of survivors and witnesses of the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, with a particular emphasis on the 1995 genocide in Srebrenica. The integration is the result of the Institute’s partnership with the Srebrenica Memorial Center.

Branko Lustig, producer of Schindler’s List and our 50,000th interviewee in the Visual History Archive; recalls returning to Auschwitz during the filming of the TV mini-series War and Remembrance. Branko also describes how important it is not only to remember the Holocaust but also for future generations to learn from it.

June 20th is recognized by the United Nations as International Refugee Day to raise awareness of the plight of the refugees around the world. In the Visual History Archive, the testimonies of genocide survivors include their personal experiences as refugees. As of now, the world is facing the biggest refugee crisis since World War II. To shed light on the current and past refugee crisis explore 10 interesting facts about the refugee experience.

Professor Atina Grossmann gave a public lecture co-hosted by the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research and the USC Max Kade Institute, offering a different reading of World War II and the Holocaust by mapping Jewish death, survival, and displacement via what she called the geographical margins – the colonial and semi-colonial regions including the Soviet interior, Central Asia, Iran, and British India.

"Growing Up Jewish During the Holocaust in Hungary” Barnabas Balint (PhD candidate in History, Magdalen College, University of Oxford, UK)  2021-2022 Breslauer, Rutman, and Anderson Research Fellow  March 29, 2022  

Join MacArthur Grant-winner Dr. Josh Kun of USC and UCLA's Dr. Todd Presner in our first Scholar Lab webinar focusing on the question "Why the Jews?". Dr. Alexis Lerner will moderate. Free to the public.

We continue the 10-part Echoes and Reflections series with Lesson 5: The "Final Solution."

Our 10-part Echoes and Reflections series continues with Lesson 6: Jewish Resistance.

Bothe’s lecture, “Meeting Survivors Online: Negotiating Memory in the Virtual In-Between,” focused on both the theory and practical implications of the “digital turn,” or the rapidly evolving digital landscape that is changing how people interact with the virtual and analog worlds. Her research is centered on the Visual History Archive as a paradigmatic example of this shift in action.

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.

Barnabas Balint is a PhD candidate in History at Magdalen College, University of Oxford, UK and the 2021-2022 Breslauer, Rutman, and Anderson Research Fellow at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research. Read more about him here. 

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.

Alla Svitlynets graduated with honors from Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Ukraine, holding a bachelor's degree in history and a master's degree in anthropology. She started her career in Kyiv, but after the outbreak of Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine, Alla made the courageous decision to relocate to Los Angeles. She joined the USC Shoah Foundation team in March 2024.

Roza Petrosyan graduated with honors from USC with Bachelor Degrees in history and social psychology, as well as a minor in Russian area studies. She interned at the USC Shoah Foundation for three years and continues to work at the Institute as a researcher. In the fall, Roza will attend USC Gould School of Law with the hopes of becoming a human rights advocate.

The Killer Within: What the Act of Killing brings to our understanding of violenceBig Data & Humanity: How scholars can harness big data to learn, teach, and healChanging the World through Testimony: Twenty years after the first testimonies were taken, the Visual History Archive is reaching even more people

Bella Fox recalls the terrifying experience of arriving to Auschwitz-II Birkenau from the Sighet ghetto in Romania. Bella’s testimony was collected by the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre and will be integrated into the Visual History Archive part of the Preserving the Legacy Initiative.

In partnership with organizations in the United States and Israel, the USC Shoah Foundation began collecting testimony from survivors of the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, just weeks after they occurred. These testimonies will be preserved and made available to the public as part of the Visual History Archive’s Countering Antisemitism Through Testimony Collection, which documents antisemitism after 1945.

Los Angeles, Nov. 15, 2016 – USC Shoah Foundation is offering one member of the public and a guest the chance to attend its Ambassadors for Humanity Gala in December. The gala is a crucial part of the Institute’s efforts helping to forge partnerships that sustain the organization into the future. The gala raises much-needed general funds to support its educational programs including expansion of the Institute’s award-winning IWitness website, professional development for educators globally, the Center for Advanced Genocide Research, academic conferences, expanding access to the Visual History Archive and testimony preservation, to name a few.

The fifth annual ucLADINO symposium at UCLA will include a panel featuring USC students who have utilized testimony in their research on the Ladino language.

Sara Cohan, USC Shoah Foundation’s Armenian education program consultant, will give a presentation for educators called “Women’s Voices: Testimony as a Tool of Empowerment.”

At the American Library Association's Annual Conference and Exposition -- New Orleans. (June 21-26) Location: Morial Convention Center, Rm 227

The Holocaust is not widely taught in Latin America. Few books on the subject are available in Spanish, and university classes that do touch on the history are sometimes outdated.

Join the Montreal Holocaust Museum, USC Shoah Foundation, and Paragraphe Bookstore for a special event with author Rachael Cerrotti about her latest book “We Share the Same Sky” based on her award-winning podcast.

An animated short film that brings to life the remarkable childhood journey of media personality, author and Holocaust survivor Dr. Ruth K. Westheimer netted one of the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival’s three coveted Audience Awards last month. Produced by USC Shoah Foundation and Delirio Films, Ruth: A Little Girl’s Big Journey traces Dr. Ruth’s escape from Nazi Germany during the Holocaust. The film was awarded the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival’s Best Short Film prize in early April.