The child of Holocaust survivors, George Schaeffer has supported USC Shoah Foundation’s mission since he first heard about it. His parents met after the Soviets liberated Ravensbrück, the Nazis’ largest concentration camp for women. His father had been sent there as a laborer. The couple married in 1945, the same year they were freed.

Wendy Smith Meyer first learned about the USC Shoah Foundation in 1996, when her parents, Alfred and Selma Benjamin, gave their testimony. She attended part of the interview, when her parents, who grew up in Nazi Germany, gave their first-person accounts of increasing Jewish persecution. Her uncles, Owen and Edgar Hirsch, and aunt Elise Le Hu also gave testimony.

To honor his parents — now age 93 and 85 — Shapiro endowed the Sara and Asa Shapiro Annual Holocaust Testimony Scholar and Lecture Fund. The program it supports enables scholars to spend up to a month in residence at USC Shoah Foundation’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research. Each fellowship culminates in a public lecture.

Diane Wohl and her husband, Howard, have supported USC Shoah Foundation — The Institute for Visual History and Education since before it became part of the university. They appreciate how the Institute brings people together and, as she puts it, “can slice out all the propaganda and hate with its visual testimonies.”

USC Shoah Foundation has launched a path-breaking online teaching tool to enable students and educators to ask questions that prompt real-time recorded responses from Holocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter. The tool will be available at no cost through a new activity in the Institute’s flagship educational website, IWitness.

My recent stay at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my academic career.  From the remarkable power and content of the Visual History Archive, to the welcoming and helpful nature of the staff and donor community, I leave my term as the Breslauer, Rutman, and Anderson Research Fellow strengthened by new friendships and enriched by new findings for my work. 

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.

Part of a series that will examine genocide and the law, this moderated discussion will explore why eyewitness testimony matters in preventing genocide. USC Shoah Foundation Finci-Viterbi Executive Director Stephen Smith will lead the conversation with witnesses and experts in the field to tackle this urgent challenge from multiple perspectives.