Teachers across Poland traveled to Hungary last week to attend a workshop organized by USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education (the Institute). The workshop, part of the Institute’s Teaching with Testimony for the 21st Century program, took place at Central European University in Budapest from November 11 to November 16. During the workshop, the teachers learned how to use interviews with Holocaust survivors and witnesses for education.

(LOS ANGELES, CA, March 1, 2012) – “Don’t Let Their Voices Be Forgotten” is the message that the USC Institute of Armenian Studies’ Leadership Council is sending as it invites a cross section of highly respected community leaders and benefactors to a gala banquet on April 15, 2012, in honor of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for championing the Armenian Genocide Digitization Project.

The email wasn’t so different from many others I’ve received since I started working at the USC Shoah Foundation last summer. A woman named Olga in Germany was moved by watching survivor Paula Lebovics talk about her stolen childhood during the Holocaust. Olga had a young daughter of her own and felt an immediate bond with Paula, who was taken to Auschwitz when she was the same age. And so she wanted to contact her.

USC Shoah Foundation announced today the upcoming release of the Searching for Never Again Podcast which launches on April 22nd. From the heartbreaking to the inspirational, the podcast explores the past and present of antisemitism and hate, and how together we can understand and resist it.

Aegis Trust Rwanda’s new director of education took a deep dive into USC Shoah Foundation’s work in Rwanda during his visit to Los Angeles last week.

Senior scholars in Holocaust and genocide studies are invited to apply for the 2015-2016 Center Research Fellowship. The deadline is Dec. 1, 2014.

Due to the ongoing political and military conflicts in their country, many students in Ukraine have something in common with Holocaust survivors: They have all experienced the fear and uncertainty of war.

Wolf Dieter Bihl is a famous Austrian historian, with a number of published works on Austria-Hungary and the First World War. In this clip, he is touching upon two important issues pertaining to the history of the Armenian Genocide. The first is his assertion that representatives of the allies of the Ottoman Empire during the war, i.e. that other Central Powers, and Germany and Austria-Hungary in particular, reported extensively in their internal, confidential correspondence that what the Young Turk government was up to was actually a determined attempt to exterminate the Armenian race.

International training consultant Martin Šmok will talk about IWalks with Andrea Petö, former USC Shoah Foundation Teaching Fellow, at the "My Hero, Your Enemy" international conference in Czech Republic.

Board of Councilors member Lee Liberman and Lisa Hofheimer, finance director of the Lee Liberman Charitable Foundation, visited USC Shoah Foundation today to meet with staff about upcoming programs.

USC Shoah Foundation hosted a special event titled The Digital Future of Holocaust Memory and Education in Aspen, Colorado, yesterday, to introduce new supporters to the work of the Institute.

Steven Spielberg will present William Clay Ford Jr., executive chairman of Ford Motor Company, with USC Shoah Foundation’s highest honor — the Ambassador for Humanity Award –– at the organization’s annual gala.

Survivors and their testimonies have been central to Holocaust research and memorial culture. Even before the end of the Shoah, survivor historians in parts of Eastern Europe liberated from Nazi occupation collected testimonies and conducted interviews with fellow survivors.

“Research With Testimonies: Featuring the Center's 2020 Lev Student Research Fellows” Lucy Sun (USC undergraduate student, History major) and Rachel Zaretsky (MFA candidate in Art, USC Roski School of Art and Design) 2020 Beth and Arthur Lev Student Research Fellows April 14, 2021

Martha Stroud manages the day-to-day operations of the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research, which advances innovative interdisciplinary research on the Holocaust and other genocides and promotes use of the Visual History Archive in research and teaching. She joined the Center in 2015 after earning her PhD in Medical Anthropology at UC Berkeley.

In this talk, Ayşenur Korkmaz explored how the survivors and their descendants reflect on their ‘place of origin’ and ex-social networks in the former Ottoman Empire. What did or does ‘home’ and ‘homeland’ mean to them when it no longer exists in the way that they imagine(d)? How do we make sense of their site of memories and imaginations of the material and relational ‘home,’ and everyday life before the genocide?

My grandmother, Hana, taught me to be alone, to be able to sit in my space and observe all around. She taught me to describe what I see — the stacks of history books, cards sent from friends, photos of my family, vinyls stacked high, and the flowers from my last trip to the grocery store. She taught me to take an interest in the simple parts of life and to find symbolism and comfort in the mundane.

This past May, a friend sent me an article he knew I would appreciate. It was an opinion piece in the New York Times titled “Burying My Bubby During the Pandemic” written by a comedy writer named Eitan Levine who, like me, grew up with a grandmother who survived the Holocaust. I began to read and found myself immediately wrapped inside his writing which was so honest it was cathartic. I immediately reached out to Eitan and asked if his grandmother’s testimony was in USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive.

September 10, 2010: the USC Shoah Foundation Institute hosted a panel discussion that addressed the role of testimony in the process of national mourning, transitional justice, and memorialization.

Kori Street, PhD, director of education for USC Shoah Foundation, will deliver a presentation about its IWitness Program at the University of Miami’s 12th annual Holocaust Teacher Summer Institute on June 13, 2013. Street’s talk, “Learning to Use Holocaust Survivor Testimony in the Classroom,” will address the program’s value in teaching eyewitness history, as well as its ability to help build digital literacy. The Holocaust Teacher Institute is sponsored by the University of Miami School of Education & Human Development and the Miami Dade County Public Schools.

USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education received the Arpa Foundation Award of the 2012 Arpa International Film Festival. The Institute was recognized for "its outstanding achievement in Holocaust education and preservation of testimonies of survivors." Executive Director Stephen D. Smith accepted the award on behalf of the Institute at the December 2 gala awards banquet in Los Angeles.

March 24, 2014: 2014 Senior Institute Fellow Dr. Douglas Greenberg, Rutgers University Distinguished Professor of History, discusses a place that was in six different countries in the 20th century: the region of Wolyn, which is now in Ukraine. He is currently conducting research to reconstruct the experience of the survivors of the Holocaust who came from Wolyn, where 250,000 Jews were murdered before the death camps were completely operational.

A few weeks ago, a student I was interviewing for a profile I was writing on him for USC Shoah Foundation’s website said something interesting: “Growing up Jewish, the Holocaust is pretty much always there.” I could identify. As someone who went to Hebrew school twice a week, every week, from the age of 5 to 13, the Holocaust was something I was always aware of. I was taught about it frequently, both in religious and regular school.

Jean-Marc Dreyfus (University of Manchester, United Kingdom) 2018-2019 Center Research Fellow “Corpses of the Holocaust” November 13, 2018

Earlier this year, thanks to a new collaboration with the Srebrenica Memorial Center, USC Shoah Foundation took possession of a pilot collection of 20 testimonies of survivors and witnesses of the 1995 genocide in Srebrenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina. The testimonies document the genocide of more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim (Bosniak) men and boys and the deportation of over 25,000 women and children that occurred in parts of eastern Bosnia-Herzegovina during the 1992-1995 war.

July 11 marks 26 years since the Srebrenica genocide, the biggest in a cluster of massacres that occurred as part of the campaign of ethnic cleansing in eastern parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina during the 1992-1995 war in the country. It’s the day in 1995 that Bosnian Serb forces led by General Ratko Mladic overran the enclave of Srebrenica, the town in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina the United Nations had formally designated as a “safe area” in 1993. 

Central European University (CEU) to host an international workshop, bringing together participants engaged in Holocaust education.

From the spring 2014 issue of PastForward: French film director and documentarian Claude Lanzmann visited USC Shoah Foundation for the first time this December, bringing with him his latest film and a simple request for the future.

It was Ford Motor Company Executive Director William Clay Ford Jr.’s commitment to education and his devotion to the Detroit community that prompted USC Shoah Foundation to honor him with this year’s Ambassador for Humanity Award.

Poland faces a horrible wave of extremism after the election of a new right-wing government. As an educator and Polish citizen, I am not only scared by this type of radical hatred, but it also reminds me of the past because the same organization that marches on the streets of Polish cities today, organized boycotts of Jewish institutions and forbade Jewish students from studying at Polish universities before WWII.