Middle and high school students have the chance to win scholarships of up to $5,000 – and additional money for their educators and schools – by entering the third annual IWitness Video Challenge.

Kiril Feferman, PhD, the 2015-2016 Center Fellow, gave a public lecture at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research focusing on the underresearched topic of the role of religion in influencing the behavior and decisions of Jews and non-Jews in the Nazi-occupied Soviet territories between 1941 and 1944.

Much like testimony shows how regimes have constructed borders; testimony demonstrates how individuals can construct bridges to connect with people of different beliefs and identities.

From September 11 to September 14, 2016, the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide hosted the international conference "A Conflict? Genocide and Resistance in Guatemala."

The Kristallnacht pogrom was a critical turning point on the path to genocide, and all of our #IWitnessChat participants agreed that using testimony is a meaningful way for students to understand and connect with the event. Hearing survivors’ detailed accounts of this night makes it much more accessible to students.

In light of the heated rhetoric that has come to characterize this historically polarized presidential campaign, USC Shoah Foundation has released a new activity on IWitness – its free online education platform for secondary students – called “Skittles, Deplorables and ‘All Lives Matter’: Leadership and Media Literacy.”

The Challenge invites students to positively contribute to their communities, and complete an IWitness activity that involves submitting a short video explaining how they were inspired through testimony to make a positive impact.

A rare collection containing hundreds of artifacts and written material brought back from Nazi Germany by an American Jewish soldier has been acquired by the USC Libraries as part of a longstanding collaboration with the USC Shoah Foundation’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research.

Four of USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research’s summer 2016 research fellows returned to the Institute on Tuesday, April 4, to share the outcomes of their fellowships and the impact of testimony on their work.

von Frijtag questioned commonly-held perceptions about relations between Dutch Jews and gentiles during the Holocaust during her tenure as USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research’s 2017-2018 Center Fellow.

The award-winning author of ‘In the Name of Humanity: the Secret Deal to End the Holocaust’ was an interviewer for USC Shoah Foundation.

Triggered by the deadly white nationalist rally of last August, USC Shoah Foundation launched Stronger Than Hate, an initiative that draws on the power of eyewitness testimony to help students and the general public recognize and counter antisemitism, racism, xenophobia and other forms of hatred.

Each year, the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research hosts an interdisciplinary team of scholars from different universities and different countries for one week so that they can develop and discuss a collaborative innovative research project in the field of Holocaust and Genocide

In China, the number of people still alive who survived the 1937 Nanjing Massacre at the hands of Japanese invaders has fallen to minuscule levels – some experts put the number around 80. USC Shoah Foundation’s collection of about 100 testimonies of survivors from this rampage that killed some 300,000 civilians and unarmed soldiers includes the vast majority of them. This fall, the Institute reached a milestone: The entire collection of Nanjing testimonies has been indexed and subtitled in English.

Each year, the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research hosts a team of scholars from different universities, different countries, and different academic disciplines for one week so that they can develop and discuss a collaborative, innovative, and interdisciplinary research project in the fi

USC Shoah Foundation today presents the first of two events in Aspen, Colorado hosted by Melinda Goldrich, a prominent member of the Aspen philanthropic community who serves on USC Shoah Foundation’s Board of Councilors’ Executive Committee.

USC President Carol L. Folt and scholars from USC and beyond gathered at the global headquarters of USC Shoah Foundation on November 11 for the public launch of the redesigned Visual History Archive, the world’s largest collection of primary source video testimonies from survivors of the Holocaust and other genocides. 

George Clooney is well known as an actor, director, producer and writer. But it was his global humanitarian efforts that received the attention on Oct. 3 when he was honored with the Ambassador for Humanity Award by Steven Spielberg.

The USC Shoah Foundation Institute, whose work centers on making educational and scholarly use of their archive of nearly 52,000 video testimonies of survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust, will hold its third annual Teaching with Testimony Workshop this week for participants in the Institute’s Master Teacher Program, who hail from 15 cities in seven states.

Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust to create 65-screen video sculpture presenting USC Shoah Foundation Institute’s archive of 52,000 interviews with Holocaust survivors and other witnessesSurvivor video wall to further award-winning, nationally-recognized Museum’s role as a leader in exhibit innovation105,000 hours of interviews – representing every survivor and witness video available in the Institute’s archive—to be presented in the course of the year.

In July, Anna Lenchovska and Oleksandr Voitenko conducted a workshop entitled "The Power of Video Testimonies in the Formation of Historical Memory," for 32 teachers from Georgia and Armenia. The workshop was part of Sources of Tolerance.

Over 3,000 teachers trained and equipped with a new tolerance education resource.

Four years in development, Recollections integrates testimony from eyewitnesses.

Students and others will have access to testimonies.

Auschwitz, the final destination of Jewish people from across Europe destined to be murdered as a part of the Nazi genocide of the Jews. Auschwitz, a place that housed prisoners of many religions, persuasions, minorities and nationalities, but whose evil reputation is seared onto our collective conscience because the five gas chambers at Birkenau were there for one reason only - to devour the lives of 960,000 Jews. Auschwitz, which has evolved into a universal symbol of man's inhumanity to man – and indeed it does remind us just how cruel human beings can be.

We have ample historical evidence that hateful words can be as dangerous as physical violence itself. German poet, Heinrich Heine said in 1821, “He who burns books will soon burn people.”

American Jewish Committee (AJC) and the USC Shoah Foundation announced today at AJC Global Forum their newly formed partnership to give voice to, document, and map modern-day antisemitism around the world. 

April is Genocide Awareness Month, a time to reflect on atrocities of the past while ensuring that we avoid acts of mass murder in the future. The urgency of this mandate was highlighted just weeks ago when the U.S. House of Representatives and the State Department officially recognized that ISIS is committing genocide in the Middle East.

The Holocaust is inarguably the most heinous crime against a group of people we have seen in modern times. Despite decades of wrestling with how such an atrocity could have occurred and the postwar generation promising never again, history keeps repeating itself. Therefore, the collection and the custody of testimonies from those who bear witness remains a necessary task for as long as inhumanities keep occurring. Genocide and crimes against humanity transcend religions, cultures, languages, geographic regions, socioeconomics, gender, age, etc., making testimony collection across all cultures not only a moral responsibility, but imperative given the mission of USC Shoah Foundation. We know for sure that under a certain set of circumstances, genocide could happen anywhere, and again.

"New Perspectives on Kristallnacht: After 80 Years, the Nazi Pogrom in Global Comparison"