A chance encounter leads to a surprising reunion

Move-in day for students at the University of Southern California this week led to a remarkable small-world moment between two strangers with ties to the Holocaust in the public-exhibit space of USC Shoah Foundation’s lobby.

Fifty-eight-year-old Alexander Moissis of the San Francisco Bay Area and his wife were helping their freshman son move into a dormitory when Alexander decided to steal away for a few minutes to visit USC Shoah Foundation, which is located on campus next to the dorm.

Teaching the Holocaust in Latin America

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 Few books on the subject are available in Spanish, and university classes that do touch on the history are sometimes outdated.

Center for Advanced Genocide Research Awards 2019 Beth and Arthur Lev Student Research Fellowship to Anna Lee

Anna Lee, a junior at USC from Los Angeles, California majoring in English Literature with minors in Spanish and Teaching English as a Second language (TESOL), has been chosen as the 2019 Beth and Arthur Lev Student Research Fellow at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research.

Speaking from the grave

Last week a group of us from USC Shoah Foundation were in Guatemala with our testimony partner, the Foundation for Forensic Anthropology in Guatemala (FAFG). We attended the funeral of a Mayan man whose remains were recently exhumed by FAFG – 36 years after he disappeared during the genocide there.

Newly expanded Holocaust memorial plaza in Philadelphia features testimony via IWalk

The app by USC Shoah Foundation guides visitors as they move through the plaza, providing explanations about each interpretive element, as well as personal stories by survivors, maps, photos and other multimedia.

Dr. Anne-Berenike Rothstein to Visit USC Shoah Foundation to Research New Ways of Transforming and Mediating Memory of the Holocaust

Dr. Anne-Berenike Rothstein, a researcher in the Department of Romance and Comparative Literature and an Academic Counselor at the University of Konstanz, Germany, will visit the USC Shoah Foundation this fall to conduct research on methods of transforming and mediating memory of the Holocaust. Dr. Rothstein will be in residence at the Institute for two weeks in September 2018 in order to further research on a project which re-conceptualizes a guided tour for a satellite camp of Dachau.

Linguistics professor mines the Archive for material that will augment his research on marginalized languages

Aria Razfar, a fellow in residence this summer at USC Shoah Foundation’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research, sees parallels between the status of Yiddish in pre-war Germany and the status of Black English in the U.S. public school system.

80 years ago: An international conference to discuss Jewish refugees ends in failure

Eighty years ago, at the behest of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, representatives from 32 countries convened for a refugee conference in Evian-les-Bains, France to address a gathering storm in Nazi Germany – and discuss what to do about the intensifying persecution of Jews throughout Europe.

The event from July 6-15, 1938 would end in failure.

Filmmaker to give full footage of genocide trial in Guatemala to USC Shoah Foundation

A handful of witnesses in the genocide trial against former Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt appear in Pamela Yates’ film “500 Years,” but her cameras captured the entire proceeding. The case is considered a landmark in human rights law.

USC Shoah Foundation adds 5 IWitness activities in Spanish about Guatemala Genocide

The release follows the recent completion of 489 interviews with the survivors of the Guatemala Genocide at the hands of the Guatemalan military in the early 1980s.