Join USC Shoah Foundation and The Leichtag Foundation for a dialogue between film producers and scholars, Konstantin Fam, Clint Burkett, Alan Markowitz, Kori Street and Jacqueline S. Gmach

USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of Ruth Pearl, mother of slain Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl and co-founder and CFO of The Daniel Pearl Foundation, which promotes cross-cultural understanding through journalism and music.

Suzette Sheft first recognized the importance of recording family history when it was already too late. As a young child, the New York City student had regularly listened to her father’s stories, but when he died of pancreatic cancer when she was just 13, she realized she was unable to remember many of them. “When he was alive, he would tell me stories about his life while tucking me in each night, but in the months following his death, I found myself forgetting many of his recollections,” Suzette said.

Professor Peter Hayes, world-renowned scholar of the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, will serve as the 2019-2020 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research.

USC Shoah Foundation - The Institute for Visual History and Education is pleased to announce its Fellows for 2013/2014 academic year.

The four-year project will identify and develop resources, activities and pathways into IWitness that will be appropriate and effective for teaching the Holocaust and other topics at Jewish day schools of all denominations.

On November 24 at 8AM PST/11AM EST, USC Shoah Foundation Finci-Viterbi Executive Director Stephen Smith will moderate a panel of experts convened by UNESCO to launch UNESCO and OSCE's latest publication on antisemitism. Addressing Anti-Semitism in Schools: Training Curricula, a new four volume resource for teacher and school director trainers is UNESCO's second publication dedicated to antisemitism since 2018. The resource and event are designed to engage in meaningful discussions about effective ways to address antisemitism through education.

The foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” (German acronym EVZ) is hosting an international workshop on the use of Holocaust survivor testimonies in education January 9-11.

A public lecture by Christopher R. Browning (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) 2017-2018 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence

Public lecture by Lukas Meissel (PhD candidate, Haifa University, Israel) 2018-2019 Greenberg Research Fellow

USC Shoah Foundation and the Museum of Jewish Heritage are joining forces on July 12 to host the official New York City premiere of My Name Is Sara, a feature film based on the true story of a young girl’s survival during the Holocaust while hiding in plain sight in the Ukrainian countryside. Produced in association with USC Shoah Foundation, the film was an Official Selection at over 50 festivals internationally, taking home five Best Feature Awards. Strand Releasing will bring the movie to New York theatres on July 13, 2022 and nationwide beginning July 22, 2022.

When watching a testimony in the Visual History Archive, Liliane Weissberg pays close attention to the words the survivor is saying, and, just as importantly, to the silences in between those words.

On Jan. 19, 2016, the Organization of Istanbul Armenians (OIA) organized a commemoration for the ninth anniversary of the assassination of prominent Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink. It was exactly nine years after my friends and I learned of his murder without fully understanding who he was and what his legacy would mean to us in the years to come.

A public lecture by Sina Fabian (Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany, History) USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research Visiting Scholar (Join us in person for this lecture or attend virtually on Zoom) Organized by the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research

Attendees from the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and the Ukraine.

    -   Call for Papers INoGS 9th International Conference Genocide and Survivor Communities: Agency, Resistance, Recognition June 23-26, 2024 University of Southern California Los Angeles On the ancestral and unceded territory of the Tongva and Kizh Nation peoples

The 2017 Interdisciplinary Research Week team gave a public lecture to discuss the progress of their project so far, in which they plan to comparatively analyze the individual experiences and narratives of Holocaust survivors in four Latin American countries.

Rena Quint has worked hard to find a balance between moving beyond memory and living inside of it, between yearning to know—and have proof of—where she came from and what she lost, but of not wanting to be defined by it.

The USC Shoah Foundation has partnered with the National Library of Israel to provide Israelis with the first countrywide access to the Institute's entire Visual History Archive, including testimonies from more than 52,000 Holocaust survivors and hundreds of survivors of the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks.

We are saddened to hear of the recent passing of Jack Welner, who survived a Jewish ghetto in Poland, a labor camp near the Dachau concentration camp in Germany, and the Auschwitz Nazi death camp in Poland – where his mother was murdered on arrival – before immigrating to Denver, Colorado, where he began a new life. He was 98. When Welner gave his testimony to USC Shoah Foundation in 1995, it changed his life.

We at USC Shoah Foundation are saddened to learn about the passing of Marion Pritchard, a Dutch woman of great courage who rescued many Jews during the Holocaust. She was 96.

Professor Dan Stone, a renowned historian of the Holocaust, will serve as the 2023-2024 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research and USC Shoah Foundation. He will spend a week in residence at the Center and USC Shoah Foundation in April and deliver the Annual Sara and Asa Shapiro Lecture entitled “The Holocaust: An Unfinished History” on April 8, 2024.

A lecture by Teresa Walch (University of California, San Diego) 2016-2017 Robert J. Katz Research Fellow in Genocide Studies    

This event will bring together leading perspectives from researchers, academics and historical archival institutions to explore the pressing challenges and emerging opportunities for building, preserving, and providing access to archives.

USC Shoah Foundation Institute to participate in worldwide activities.

About a month before the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, sparking World War II, a desperate Jewish father in Germany penned a letter in broken English to a friend in England, Mrs. Wolf.  “I beg to inform you that we have got a refuse from the Aid Committee in London, owing to our high waiting number for America. … We are very discouraged by this answer and are now forced to get out our children as quick as possible.” Alfons Lasker, an attorney in Breslau, was on a mission to get his two daughters – Anita and Renate – out of Germany. He did not succeed.

Teachers from all over Hungary gathered in Budapest this month for the six-day introductory seminar to the USC Shoah Foundation’s 2013 Teaching with Testimony for the 21st Century program. But there was one educator among them who didn’t just travel across the country – he came from the other side of the world.

One feature of her research is examining the role of the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive interviews in the construction of social memory of the Holocaust in the Soviet Jewish community and more widely in the post-Soviet society. During her month-long residency at the Center, Rebrova examined some of the USC Shoah Foundation’s institutional records about the selection, training, and methodology of interviewers in Russia.

In the Spring 2014 issue of PastForward, USC Shoah Foundation's international consultants explain the power of watching testimony on location.