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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.
Pinchas Gutter / Wednesday, November 11, 2020
USC Shoah Foundation is saddened to learn of the passing of Claude Lanzmann, whose monumental film "Shoah" introduced a new way of telling the story of the Holocaust. He died in Paris on Tuesday. He was 92.   Born Nov. 27, 1925, in Paris to Jewish parents, Lanzmann went into hiding during World War II. At 17, he joined the French resistance.  
/ Thursday, July 5, 2018
The group visiting the Institute’s office on Tuesday were students in Robert Hernandez’ digital journalism class at USC.
New Dimensions in Testimony / Wednesday, March 29, 2017
Seventy years after the camp was liberated, institute helps bring survivors, teachers and others to milestone event. The Auschwitz camp is seen at the end of the tracks.
/ Tuesday, January 20, 2015
Yehuda Bauer (z”l) was much more than his many well-deserved titles, including (but not limited to) Professor Emeritus of History and Holocaust Studies at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Academic Advisor to Yad Vashem, and Honorary Chair of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. He was also a friend and mentor.
/ Friday, October 18, 2024
I had interviewed dozens of Gabersdorf survivors, discovered there had been 10 other women’s slave labor camps in Trutnov, then Trautenau, Sudetenland and that the 5,000 Polish Jewish women trafficked to Trutnov were among the first to be imprisoned in Nazi camps and the last to be liberated, on May 8th--9th, 1945. Didn’t they deserve to be honored, too?
op-eds / Friday, May 5, 2017
The Information Quest about Howard Cwick introduces students to one of the American soldiers who was there for the liberation of the Buchenwald death camp.
iwitness, IWitness activity, Howard Cwick / Thursday, December 25, 2014
The University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M University are each hosting presentations about USC Shoah Foundation, the Visual History Archive and its possibilities for research this week.
wolf gruner, cagr, Crispin Brooks, visual history archive, texas / Monday, April 4, 2016
Jewish track-and-field athlete Margaret Lambert remembers the pressure she felt when competing in the Adolf Hitler Stadium during the 1936 Olympic tryouts for a non-Jewish audience that objected to her presence. Maria Breitinger had her decathelon medal denied by her antisemitic school principal. Jules Forgacs remembers his first soccer match after liberation.
sports, margaret lambert, antiSemitism / Wednesday, September 25, 2019
November 9 and 10 marks the anniversary of the 1938 Kristallnacht (“The Night of Broken Glass”) pogrom, the first major public and government-sanctioned display of antisemitic violence against Jews in Germany. Orchestrated by the Nazis in retaliation for the assassination of a German embassy official in Paris by a seventeen-year-old Jewish youth named Herschel Grynzspan, 1,400 synagogues and 7,000 businesses were destroyed, almost 100 Jews were killed, and 30,000 were arrested and sent to concentration camps.
/ Friday, October 29, 2021
The Division of Academic Programs at the USC Shoah Foundation invites applications from PhD candidates and early-career scholars for the inaugural cohort of fellows in its non-residential colloquium “The LGBTQIA+ Community in the Holocaust.” We understand this topic broadly and are seeking applicants whose work touches on the members of any nation persecuted by the Nazis or their allies for their sexual identity, along with the long-term impact and legacies of this history.
research, academics / Monday, April 29, 2024
After signing the Munich Agreement in September 1938 and under the pretext of protecting the interests of ethnic Germans who agitated for Nazi rule, Hitler annexed the Czechoslovakian borderlands. While some still hoped that giving up Czechoslovak territory would bring peace, the agreement signed by Great Britain, Germany, Italy, and France meant the beginning of occupation for the citizens of Czechoslovakia.
czech, student film, holocaust, yad vashem / Wednesday, March 20, 2013
Roman Kent, Auschwitz survivor, speaking at the commemorationIt took months of preparation. But there is little one can do to prepare for a visit to Auschwitz.
a70, auschwitz / Wednesday, January 28, 2015
USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of Marta (Weiss) Wise, who was ten years old when she was liberated from Auschwitz, having endured the medical torture of Josef Mengele, along with her sister, Eva (Weiss) Slonim. She was 88. Marta and Eva were among a group of children pictured in a photograph—a still from a film shot by a Soviet cameraman soon after the liberation of Auschwitz—that became an iconic image of the horrors of the death camp where nearly one million Jews were killed during the Holocaust.
/ Thursday, May 25, 2023
Gabór M. Tóth, a postdoctoral associate currently completing a dual fellowship at the Yale University Digital Humanities Lab and the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, has been awarded the 2018-2019 Center Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. This fellowship provides support to an outstanding postdoctoral scholar from any discipline who will advance digital genocide research through the use of the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive (VHA).
cagr / Saturday, August 4, 2018
Florian Zabranksy, a PhD candidate at the Centre for German-Jewish Studies at the University of Sussex, United Kingdom, has been awarded the 2020-2021 Margee and Douglas Greenberg Research Fellowship at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. He will be in residence at the Center in Spring 2021 in order to conduct research for his dissertation, which examines male Jewish intimacy during the Holocaust.
cagr / Monday, July 6, 2020
The on-location testimony of Ed Mosberg recounting the horrors he experienced at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria will be the second of its kind by USC Shoah Foundation. The Institute's first 360-degree testimony -- the critically acclaimed VR film "The Last Goodbye" -- takes viewers on a harrowing tour of the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland.
virtual reality, ed mosberg, 360 testimony, Mauthausen, VR / Tuesday, July 10, 2018
The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research first began a partnership with the Holocaust Geographies Collaborative in 2014, when the team visited the Institute to explore the ways in which the Visual History Archive can be used to create geographic visualizations of the Holocaust.
cagr / Wednesday, August 15, 2018
Wolf Gruner, director of USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, continues his two-month residence at the Berlin-Brandenurg Center for Jewish Studies with a lecture about Jewish resistance and a Visual History Archive workshop for researchers next Thursday, July 9.
wolf gruner / Wednesday, July 1, 2015
An ITS group has worked since April of 2017 to expand the discoverability of testimonies for students, researchers and anyone else searching for information about specific genocide events.
MARC, USC Libraries, catalogues, WorldCat / Wednesday, September 12, 2018
Kimberly Cheng’s lecture, “American Dreams: Jewish Refugees and Chinese Locals in Post-World War II Shanghai,” examined the collision of cultures in Shanghai, which was significantly influenced first by the persecution of Chinese by Japanese invaders throughout the country, then by the influx of Jewish refugees, and after the war ended, by the arrival and presence of U.S. troops.
Shanghai, jewish refugees, Kimberly Cheng, center / Tuesday, October 2, 2018
USC Shoah Foundation this week will launch a Teaching with Testimony Webinar for K-5 educators featuring the exclusive global premiere of Ruth: A Little Girl’s Big Journey, an animated short film that brings to life the remarkable childhood journey of media personality, author and Holocaust survivor Dr. Ruth K. Westheimer, known the world over as Dr. Ruth.  
/ Tuesday, January 26, 2021
The USC Shoah Foundation mourns the loss of Dr. Ruth K. Westheimer, a Holocaust survivor who fled Nazi Germany without her parents at the age of 10 and went on to become a renowned and beloved sex therapist and media personality. She was 96 years old. 
/ Saturday, July 13, 2024
In 2017, Mr. Feingold recorded a more than 4 hour testimony with USC Shoah Foundation as part of the Last Chance Testimony Collection, enabling Holocaust survivors to share their stories for USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive—before it is too late—where they will exist in perpetuity.
holocaust, last chance testimony, lcti / Thursday, May 7, 2020
The Institute for Visual History and Education introduces its first-ever testimony-based podcast, We Share the Same Sky. In a seven-episode arc, We Share the Same Sky presents an intimate portrait of Rachael Cerrotti’s family history and her own personal journey of love and loss as she retraces the steps of her grandmother, Hana Seckel-Drucker, who was displaced across Europe during and in the wake of World War II.
podcast, education / Monday, September 30, 2019
USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of Holocaust survivor and accomplished structural engineer Sigmund Burke, who died February 6, 2022 at nearly 98 years old. He recorded his testimony with USC Shoah Foundation in 2019, at the age of 95, as part of the Last Chance Testimony Collection initiative, USC Shoah Foundation’s race-against-time effort to record the stories and perspectives of the last remaining Holocaust survivors.
in memoriam / Tuesday, March 15, 2022
Lukas Meissel, a PhD candidate in Holocaust Studies at the University of Haifa, Israel, has been awarded the 2018-2019 Greenberg Research Fellowship at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. Meissel will be in residence at the Center for one month in early Spring 2019 to conduct research in the Visual History Archive for his doctoral dissertation, entitled “SS-Photography in Concentration Camps. Genres and Meanings of Erkennungsdienst-Photos.”
cagr / Saturday, August 4, 2018
Personal relationships between Jews and non-Jews in Europe before and during World War II will be brought to light during Geraldien von Frijtag Drabbe Künzel’s semester in residence at USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research this fall.
cagr, center fellow, netherlands / Monday, January 23, 2017
As a court reporter who helped transcribe the historic trial against doctors accused of performing vile experiments, Vivien Spitz was struck by the resentment in the eyes of the defendants.
Women at Nuremberg / Tuesday, June 26, 2018

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