In time for February’s Olympic Games and Black History Month, two new activities have been published to IWitness, each dealing with racism in different contexts.

Capping off months of preparation, study and travel, the first group of USC Shoah Foundation Junior Interns returned to the Institute’s office in May to present their final thoughts on their participation in Auschwitz: The Past is Present program.

One of Poland's most beloved films is a unique example of music uniting both Jews and gentiles in the immediate post-war period that would soon become very difficult to find anywhere else.

While students across America enjoy their summer vacation, the education department at USC Shoah Foundation is busily making major new features to its award-winning IWitness educational website for educators and their students that will be ready by the time school resumes in the fall.

In this series, we take a closer look at the new features and resources coming to IWitness in time for the 2017-2018 school year.

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.”

Shortly after I saw Schindler’s List for the first time, I had an argument with my father about the value of such Hollywood blockbusters for teaching people about the Holocaust. We debated the following question: If Schindler’s List was the only source of information for people about the Holocaust would it perhaps be better if they did not see it at all? That is, is Schindler’s List better than nothing if what it shows is all you know about what happened to nearly six million Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe? My dad said (or shouted) yes, but I was unconvinced.

USC Shoah Foundation’s Junior Interns witnessed a disturbing example of modern antisemitism firsthand during their trip to Budapest in June. And they have something to say about it.

On July 16 -17, 1942, over 13,000 Jews from Paris and its suburbs were rounded up by French police in the early morning hours and forcefully taken from their homes to both the Vélodrome d’Hiver, a winter cycling stadium in Paris, and to the Drancy internment camp.

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.

The largest gathering of Muslim and Jewish students and young professionals

A forgotten forced labor camp for Jews in Czech Republic has been rediscovered as a result of research conducted in the Visual History Archive by Marcel Mahdal, a graduate of USC Shoah Foundation’s Teaching with Testimony in the 21st Century program.

The fellowship provides summer support for one member of the University of Pennsylvania faculty to integrate the Institute’s testimonies into a new or modified existing course.

The office of the Ukrainian ombudsman conducted a seminar for 30 teachers on the best practices of human rights education using USC Shoah Foundation’s multimedia teaching guide, Where Do Human Rights Begin: Lessons of History and Contemporary Approaches.

Today marks the 83rd anniversary of the arrival of the first Kindertransport to the United Kingdom. This rescue operation saved 10,000 child refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe. As part of the commemoration, USC Shoah Foundation has produced an animated short film, “Music Dreams,” based on the story of Lisa Jura, a young Holocaust survivor who in 1938 escaped from Vienna to London on the Kindertransport.

Tonight the law firm of Holland & Knight and the Holland & Knight Charitable Foundation presented its awards and scholarships to the 10 first-place winners of the firm's Holocaust Remembrance Project, an annual national essay contest for high school students.

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 Museum of the Holocaust to create 65-screen video sculpture presenting USC Shoah Foundation Institute’s archive of 52,000 interviews with Holocaust survivors and other witnessesSurvivor video wall to further award-winning, nationally-recognized Museum’s role as a leader in exhibit innovation105,000 hours of interviews – representing every survivor and witness video available in the Institute’s archive—to be presented in the course of the year.

Today we mourn the loss of one of our closest friends, Branko Lustig, a Holocaust survivor and two-time Academy Award winner who produced Schindler’s List and played an indispensable role in the founding of USC Shoah Foundation. He was 87. Shortly after the film’s 1993 release, Lustig -- who witnessed horrific atrocities at Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and other concentration and labor camps -- led the drive to implement Steven Spielberg’s vision of collecting 50,000 Holocaust testimonies for what was then called Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation.

As we wrap up a very challenging year for many across the globe, we want to share highlights of just some of the work our Institute team and our partners have accomplished during the ongoing pandemic. Thank you for your support.

​At the academic symposium, scholars will discuss how music was used as resistance in a number of conflicts around the world. Tina Frühauf will instead focus on the very definition of “resistance” itself.

In January 2014, four scholars from the “Holocaust Geographies Collaborative”—an international, interdisciplinary group of researchers evaluated the link between personal testimony, the index of the archive and geography.

We have ample historical evidence that hateful words can be as dangerous as physical violence itself. German poet, Heinrich Heine said in 1821, “He who burns books will soon burn people.”

Documentary filmmaker, historian and curator Christian Delage gave a live interview on the Institute’s Facebook page last week, wherein he discussed his past 20 years of experience researching and making films on genocide, and where his latest project on the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks diverges from standardized methods for gathering testimony.

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.

Multi-terabyte digital media cache deployed.

The 10-part Echoes and Reflections series continues with Lesson 8: Survivors and Liberators.

A group of men is placed in several trucks. They are driven through the streets and out of town into an open area surrounded by trees. They are beaten around the head with rifle butts, made to run in a group towards an open mass grave. A mere handful of armed guards make them lie in the grave like sardines. Then they are shot one by one in broad daylight. The horrific spectacle, highly reminiscent of the Nazi Einsatzgruppen Aktions in the Soviet Union in 1941, was, in fact, the mass murder of some 30 men that took place in Iraq just this week. 

The USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of Thomas Buergenthal, one of the youngest known survivors of Auschwitz, who later became an esteemed human rights attorney and United States representative on the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Thomas passed away on May 29, 2023, in Miami, Florida. He was 89.

Special event to be hosted at Annenberg center.