Mireille Knoll managed to survive the Nazis during the Holocaust, but antisemitism is ancient and tenacious, and its tentacles finally caught up with her last week at her home in Paris. The 85-year-old Knoll was stabbed 11 times and burned after attackers – a neighbor and a homeless man – tried to set her apartment ablaze. The men, both in their 20s, were later arrested for a crime that is being investigated as an antisemitic attack. “She’s a Jew, she must have money,” said one attacker to the other, according to Gérard Collomb, the interior minister of France.

Called “Cake For Winter,” the sketch by Amanda Andrei stems from a little-known fact that was also unknown to her: During World War II, thousands of Americans and Europeans were interned at Japanese-run concentration camps in the Philippines. It was selected to be performed by actors at the Midwest Dramatists Conference in Kansas.

Included within the course’s syllabus is the testimony of Holocaust survivor Eva Slonim, who was depicted in an iconic photo of a group of children standing behind the barbed wire at Auschwitz. Slonim composed a poem along with a group of other children while imprisoned in Auschwitz.

The film was honored with the Creative Arts Award, VR – Documentary Jury Prize, at the awards ceremony held at the Warner Bros. Studio in Hollywood.

In honor of International Women's Day, USC Shoah Foundation is revisiting the story of the late Vera Laska, who joined the Czech resistance as a teenager and escorted dozens of Jews to safety in the snowy mountains of southern Slovakia.

Thanks to a new partnership between the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research and the Fortunoff Video Archive at Yale University, researchers at both institutions can now access each other's extensive Holocaust archives. Under the agreement, Yale University is now one of 95 access sites worldwide where the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive is available. Yale University is the only institution in Connecticut where the interviews of the USC Shoah Foundation's Archive are accessible in their entirety. 

Bieke Van Camp, a PhD candidate in Contemporary History at University Paul-Valéry, Montpellier (France), has been awarded the 2018-2019 Robert J. Katz Research Fellowship at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. Van Camp will be in residence at the Center in April 2019 in order to conduct research in the Visual History Archive to contribute to her doctoral dissertation, “The Shoah as a Social Experience and the Deportees as Social Groups. Socio-historical Comparative Approach to Italian and Dutch-Speaking Deportees.”

To mark the 75th anniversary of the revolt, USC Shoah Foundation is sharing the story of the recently departed Sol Liber. One of the last living fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising until his passing last month, Liber was also among USC Shoah Foundation’s first interviewees.

In a webinar interview, the film’s director and the Institute’s founder says he believes that 25 years after the release of 'Schindler's List,' the film is more important than ever. “Especially for the young people today, who face a country and a world where democracy is threatened.”

Los Angeles, February. 13, 2018 – “The Last Goodbye,” a virtual-reality film that brings the viewer inside a Nazi concentration camp with Holocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter, won a top prize at the 2018 Lumiere Awards hosted Monday by The Advanced Imaging Society. The film was honored with the Creative Arts Award, VR – Documentary Jury Prize, at the awards ceremony held at the Warner Bros. Studio in Hollywood.

Aria Razfar, a fellow in residence this summer at USC Shoah Foundation’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research, sees parallels between the status of Yiddish in pre-war Germany and the status of Black English in the U.S. public school system.

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

The history of antisemitism is strewn with the corpses of Jews who could not get out of the way when words turned to violence. The slaying of innocent Jewish lives by Pittsburgh gunman Robert Bowers, who this weekend turned his rhetoric about killing Jews into the actual killing of Jewish people, is the latest example. We need laws to allow intervention much earlier, or this will not be the last time we see Jewish people die in America because they are Jews.

As a non-Jew living in Paris, the scourge of antisemitism had, until recently, faded from my mind as a major concern. But my eyes were opened in 2016 when I was approached by the USC Shoah Foundation to executive produce for them a new collection of testimonies on contemporary antisemitism.

Like many countries around the world, we commemorated Labor Day on May 1 here in Germany. The day also coincided with the beginning of a new government position – commissioner for Jewish life in Germany and to fight antisemitism, but everyone refers to it as the “Antisemitism Commissioner.” The inaugural holder is Felix Klein, a career diplomat with an international law degree, who coincidentally happens to come from the same town I grew up in.

Kathryn Brackney, the 2017-2018 Katz Research Fellow in Genocide Studies, gave a public lecture on the research she conducted during her month in residence at the Center.

USC Shoah Foundation Finci-Viterbi Executive Director Stephen Smith delivered remarks Friday at a special event at the United Nations marking the 70th anniversary of the adoption of the international law that defined genocide and held perpetrators accountable. The observance also featured a demonstration of the Institute’s Dimensions in Testimony interactive biographies that enable people to ask questions and instantly receive pre-recorded responses from Holocaust survivors.

In recognition of their longstanding commitment to humanitarian causes and support of veterans, Rita Wilson and Tom Hanks were presented the Ambassador for Humanity Award by Kate Capshaw and Steven Spielberg, USC trustee and founder of USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education.

On April 17, 1975, the city of Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge, triggering a four-year genocide. In commemoration, USC Shoah Foundation is spotlighting its Cambodia-based learning activities for high school students.

A love of old movies drew Shiraz Bhathena into the moving image archive field. As an archivist and post-production specialist at USC Shoah Foundation, he supervised the process of restoring the Institute's testimonies with video and audio problems. The herculean task is finally complete.

Curious but friendly onlookers in the multicultural middle-class neighborhood in Amsterdam joined us. A café owner slowly crossed the street. “What’s happening?” she asked. “We are placing memorial stones in front of my grandparents’ home where they last lived before being deported in 1942,” I replied. “Please join us!”