On April 24, we call on the world to remember the genocide of the Armenian people. 109 years ago, during the First World War, Ottoman authorities arrested hundreds of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople (present-day Istanbul). At the time, the Ottoman Empire was under the control of the relatively new leadership of the Young Turks; a party that had sought to create an ethnically homogenous Turkish state – a state that would have little space for the millions of Armenians then living in that empire.

The USC Shoah Foundations mourns the passing of friend and colleague Ita Gordon, an indexer, translator, mentor, and researcher who, for nearly thirty years, channeled her passion for testimony into diligent care and expertise that helped the organization become a world leader in collecting, preserving, and sharing Holocaust survivor testimony.

As a writer fascinated by literary and political theory on history and memory, I watched students from Camino Nuevo High School interview Holocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter while I sat in awe witnessing the past and future intersect before my eyes.

I recently returned to China to record audio-visual testimonies from survivors of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre. In February 2014, the Institute incorporated 12 Nanjing testimonies into its Visual History Archive, adding a new perspective to the 53,000 testimonies that we collected from the Holocaust and the Rwandan Tutsi Genocide.

Three students from Budapest wrote short stories and poems inspired by testimony that they hope will teach others the importance of acceptance and remembrance.

There is a current controversy about the allegation that the great mufti of Jerusalem instigated the final solution of the Nazis. While there is no doubt that Haj Amin al-Husseini, was a virulent anti-Semite, history shows that the Final Solution was conceived and implemented by Nazis and nobody else.

Special education teacher Andra Coulter shares how testimony inspired her students in unprecedented ways.

USC Shoah Foundation and the Latin American network of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) will convene for two days the weekend of Sept. 10-11 to discuss teaching about genocide in Latin America.

The conference is “Legal Legacies of Genocide: From Nuremberg to the International Criminal Courts.” USC Shoah Foundation Executive Director Stephen Smith is one of the presenters.

Educators in the Detroit area and Glendale, Calif., attended professional development workshops on IWitness in the first months of 2017 in order to learn more about how to incorporate testimony into their teaching.

After a semester-long study of Holocaust survivor narratives, four students in Professor Therkel Straede’s class at the University of Southern Denmark presented the short videos they made in IWitness to an audience of faculty, students and members of the public.

The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research invites research proposals from USC undergraduate students and USC graduate students for the inaugural Beth and Arthur Lev Student Research Fellowship.

Although the Armenian Genocide is recognized in states and cities across the country, the issue remains unresolved on the national level. During a talk on April 19, Julien Zarifian outlined several reasons why the issue remains thorny in Washington D.C., more than 100 years after the genocide that left more than 1 million Armenians slaughtered.

USC Shoah Foundation is saddened to learn of the passing of Claude Lanzmann, whose monumental film "Shoah" introduced a new way of telling the story of the Holocaust. He died in Paris on Tuesday. He was 92.   Born Nov. 27, 1925, in Paris to Jewish parents, Lanzmann went into hiding during World War II. At 17, he joined the French resistance.  

The event hosted by USC Shoah Foundation’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research appears to have been the only international academic conference to mark the 80th anniversary of this fateful event of November 1938, during which Nazis and ordinary Germans murdered more than 100 Jews and destroyed thousands of synagogues, Jewish institutions, stores and homes across Germany.

The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research invites research proposals from USC undergraduate students and USC graduate students for its 2019 Beth and Arthur Lev Student Research Fellowship.

In this talk, Chad Gibbs will discuss how Jewish prisoners created what he terms “spaces of resistance” at Treblinka and how studying these locations can provide revelations about the roles of women prisoners in resistance.

USC Shoah Foundation today launches its 2021-2022 Back to School package, a suite of testimony-based resources on IWitness to help educators navigate the complex issues created by the Covid-19 pandemic and surfaced by the recent upsurge in social movements demanding racial justice. This year’s classroom activities and educator professional development modules are based on testimony from the Visual History Archive that help students to critically evaluate historical context, consider various perspectives and impacts, and reflect on personal connections.

Join Ashley K. Fernandes, MD, PhD, Associate Professor of Clinical Pediatrics and Associate Director of the Center for Bioethics at The Ohio State University College of Medicine for a webinar commemorating the 75th anniversary of the beginning of the Doctors Trial at Nuremberg, where physicians were placed on trial for their active participation in the labeling, persecution, and eventual mass murder of those deemed “lives unworthy of living.”

The Holocaust Memorial Resource and Education Center of Florida (HMREC) has unveiled architectural renderings of the new Holocaust Museum for Hope & Humanity in Orlando, Florida that will be the world’s first Holocaust museum designed around survivor and witness testimonies. USC Shoah Foundation serves as a content and creative partner in the development of the new museum, the first time the Institute has teamed with a Holocaust Museum to design and implement a ground-up and permanent museum-wide exhibition.

A public lecture by Carli Snyder (PhD candidate in History, City University of New York Graduate Center) 2022-2023 USC Shoah Foundation Robert J. Katz Research Fellow in Genocide Studies (Join us in person for this lecture or attend virtually on Zoom) Organized by the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research and the USC Shoah Foundation

Dr. Dan Leshem and Dr. Amy Carnes of USC Shoah Foundation will be leading a course to Rwanda this summer that will allow USC students to study post-genocide reconstruction.  The course, Rebuilding Rwanda: Memory, Testimony, and Living Together after Genocide, was developed in conjunction with Dr.

On June 6, Steven Spielberg, Founder of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute, presented Robert A. Iger, Chairman and CEO of The Walt Disney Company, with the Institute’s highest honor, the Ambassador for Humanity Award. Iger was honored at the Institute’s annual gala, where he was recognized for his support of the Institute’s work, his longtime philanthropy, and his leadership role in corporate citizenship. The gala presenting sponsor was jcpenny. Jimmy Kimmel hosted, and Mary J. Blige gave a special musical performance.

On June 6, Steven Spielberg, Founder of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute, presented Robert A. Iger, Chairman and CEO of The Walt Disney Company, with the Institute’s highest honor, the Ambassador for Humanity Award. Iger was honored at the Institute’s annual gala, where he was recognized for his support of the Institute’s work, his longtime philanthropy, and his leadership role in corporate citizenship. The gala presenting sponsor was jcpenny. Jimmy Kimmel hosted, and Mary J. Blige gave a special musical performance.

The word journey comes to the English language from the Old French jornee, meaning a day, or, by extension, a day’s labor or travel.  This word, which we normally associate with something pleasant, takes on a different meaning when placed in conversation with the word Holocaust.  This was the challenge placed in front of me by colleagues at UNESCO, when they requested that the USC Shoah Foundation prepare an exhibition for International Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27 – the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp.

The Problems Without Passports class hit the ground running in Kigali, Rwanda, spending their first four days in the country visiting genocide memorials and meeting with survivor support groups.

Local liaisons and educators hosted an ITeach seminar about teaching with testimony at Berzsenyi High School on Saturday, Nov. 8 - the 14th ITeach seminar in Hungary this year.

Today marks the launch of #BeginsWithMe, a social media campaign led by USC Shoah Foundation that encourages people to share what they will do to learn from the Holocaust and help fight prejudice and intolerance.

Bartov centered his discussion on how the East Galician town of Buczacz was transformed from a site of coexistence – where Poles, Ukrainians and Jews had all lived side-by-side for centuries – into a site of genocide during World War II.

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.