Instead of factories of death, these black-and-white stills convey the idea that soldiers are happy and prisoners are mere criminals serving a sentence. A research fellow with USC Shoah Foundation’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research discussed his findings on this topic in a lecture.

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.

 

Join author Judy Batalion, in conversation with Nancy Spielberg, to learn more about Batalion's new book The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos.

Two Holocaust survivors and friends of USC Shoah Foundation, Max Eisen and Dr. Agnes Kaposi, have been recognized by Queen Elizabeth II for their work in Holocaust education. Eisen was appointed to the Order of Canada for his “contributions to Holocaust education, and his promotion of transformational dialogue on human rights, tolerance and respect.”

Equipped with blankets and snacks and dressed in pajamas, 24 young women of USC’s Gamma Phi Beta settled into the living room of their sorority house last fall to watch a video of Edith Eger telling her story of survival and resilience during the Holocaust. Edith’s story struck a chord with many sisters, as she recounted how her friendships with other women saved her life in Auschwitz. In the discussion that followed, the women focused on themes of sisterhood, solidarity and cooperation.

In July 2020, Ben Ferencz, the last remaining Nuremberg prosecutor who died earlier this month, sat for a Dimensions in Testimony Education interview. Below are excerpts from the three-day conversation, which was released today.   On his Place of Birth

'Stronger Than Hate @ USC' kicked off the first virtual event in a four-part series confronting hate at USC, past, present, and future.  

With antisemitic harassment and violence surging ferociously around the globe, the USC Shoah Foundation establishes a Countering Antisemitism Laboratory to research and combat one of the world's most virulent hatreds. The USC Shoah Foundation seeks an inaugural director for the Countering Antisemitism Laboratory, which will work with scholars, journalists, policymakers, and other leadership groups to address all forms of antisemitism. The Laboratory will house a major collection of testimonies from survivors of antisemitic violence, training programs centered on understanding and responding to antisemitism, an initiative focused on digital antisemitism and Holocaust denial, and other practical research efforts.

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.

French film director Claude Lanzmann spoke candidly about his latest film, The Last of the Unjust, at a USC School of Cinematic Arts screening hosted by USC Shoah Foundation Tuesday night.

When I tell my fellow USC students that I’m the president of an organization called SFISA, it’s usually safe to assume that 90% of them have no idea what it is. It’s not the most elegant of acronyms and we acknowledge this. Our club’s full name – the Shoah Foundation Institute Student Association – is equally as unwieldy but at least it’s descriptive, and that’s something, right? But even if they’ve heard of our less than stellar name, they still might not know who we are or what we do. So let me take this moment to enlighten you.

After two months working with the USC Shoah Foundation, the 2014 Research in Industrial Projects (RIPS) team made great strides in finding a way to link an outside archive to video segments in IWitness. The team presented their findings to USC Shoah Foundation staff on Wednesday.

USC Shoah Foundation spent seven months researching the identities of every child in the liberation photo of the children behind the barbed wire, and reunited four of them yesterday in Krakow.

For nine Philadelphia high school students, a loaf of challah was one of the most special gifts they have ever received.

During the 1960s, the Guatemalan government unleashed a war against various small guerilla groups across the country. This so-called “internal conflict” turned into a 36-year genocide against Mayan populations.

    -   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

USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research’s conference “A Conflict? Genocide and Resistance in Guatemala” concluded Wednesday at Villa Aurora in Los Angeles, leaving the participants with renewed energy and ideas for continuing their conversation on the genocide in Guatemala.

A group of students from Chicago who inspired their fellow students to embrace each other’s unique identity has won the 2017 IWitness Video Challenge sponsored by USC Shoah Foundation.

Scholars Maria Zalewska, Timothy Williams and Tomasz Łysak delved into some of the newest ways genocide museum visitors are sharing their experiences on social media in the panel discussion “Social Media, Genocide Commemoration and Augmented Reality.”

In my role as part of USC Shoah Foundation’s Education Department, I have the honor of working with our team members both in the United States and around the world to create localized educational content using genocide survivor testimony. As a former classroom teacher and a lifelong believer in the importance of experiential learning, I was fortunate to take part in three IWalks in Budapest, Hungary, Prague, Czechia, and Warsaw, Poland while on a recent vacation.

Frieda E. Roos van Hessen was born on April 24, 1915 – the day the Armenian Genocide started – and survived the Holocaust by going into hiding in her native Netherlands. This week, she turned 103 surrounded by friends and neighbors at the same place she celebrates every year: the Olive Garden restaurant.

Ignited by students’ enthusiasm over IWitness's recent “100 Days to Inspire Respect” initiative, a campaign called #180DaysToInspireRespect has students at Robert Adams Middle School in Massachusetts volunteering each day to present about the respectful acts they’ve witnessed, received, read and heard about.

Coinciding with the 25th anniversary and recent rerelease of “Schindler’s List,” USC Shoah Foundation has produced a suite of learning activities connected to the film. The engaging activities encourage critical thinking; all feature clips of testimony from Holocaust survivors who were saved by Oskar Schindler.

Please join us for an exclusive event featuring a moderated conversation and selected scenes from 'My Name Is Sara,' an award-winning feature film based on a true story of survival, produced in association with USC Shoah Foundation.

Theogene Kayitakire, a sergeant in the Rwandan Patriotic Army, helped capture the strategic high ground of the Mount Rebero neighborhood in Kigali in April 1994, just days after the Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda had begun. With the location secure and reinforcements arriving, Theogene had a request for his command: Could he go to save his relatives nearby? When given permission, he disguised himself in a government army uniform and, with a few other soldiers, went to find his uncle. But his uncle refused to flee to safety without his neighbors.

July 4 is Kwibohora, also known as Rwanda Liberation Day. On this day in 1994 the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) secured the capital of Kigali and ended the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda. To commemorate Kwibohora, we spoke to three genocide survivors now residing in the United States.

Two USC scholars – graduate students Emily Geminder and Vaclav Masek - will share the Beth and Arthur Lev Student Research Fellowship for Summer 2022.

Mohammed Dajani teaches about the Holocaust to Palestinians although he insists it is impossible to do so. “In my class is a girl who was recently released from an Israeli jail. When I raised the subject of the Holocaust in class all she could say was, ‘I am still dealing with my own traumatic experiences, I am nowhere near ready to learn about this!’” Dajani is unflustered by such push back.

Development took a major step forward this month for New Dimensions in Testimony, the three-dimensional, fully interactive display of Holocaust survivors created by USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies and Conscience Display. Audiences had the chance to interact with the pilot for the first time.