Yehuda Bauer, a pioneer of Holocaust studies, and Xu Xin, who introduced the subject to universities in China, will participate in a discussion on Thursday hosted by USC Shoah Foundation.

Yehuda Bauer and Xu Xin have each led vastly different lives. But they both ended up as two of the world’s most respected and influential Holocaust scholars. For Bauer, the journey began in Czechoslovakia, where he was born in 1926. He and his family immigrated to Israel in 1939, just before World War II, and he graduated from Cardiff University in Wales after fighting in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. He received his PhD in 1960 at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and began teaching at its Institute for Contemporary Jewry the following year.