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cagr / Thursday, August 18, 2016
At UNESCO’s Paris headquarters on Jan. 27, USC Shoah Foundation Finci-Viterbi Executive Director Stephen Smith will host a panel discussion following a screening of “Who Will Write Our History,” a documentary by Director Roberta Grossman and Executive Producer Nancy Spielberg that chronicles a covert effort by a group of resistance fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto who amassed an archive of documents that would later shed light on the Nazi atrocities that occurred there.
Who Will Write Our History, screening, panel, unesco, Stephen Smith / Tuesday, January 22, 2019
Raíssa Alonso is the 2022-2023 Margee and Douglas Greenberg Research Fellow at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research. She is a PhD candidate in Social History at the University of São Paulo in Brazil.
/ Thursday, May 18, 2023
Sarah Miller gave testimony to the USC Shoah Foundation in 1997 about her family’s experiences hiding in France and Switzerland during the Holocaust – but she wasn’t finished telling her story just yet.
/ Monday, February 10, 2014
Today Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, the nonprofit organization that videotapes the firsthand testimonies of Holocaust survivors and other witnesses and make them accessible for educational purposes, opened a rare collection of Sinti and Roma Holocaust survivor testimonies at the Dokumentations und Kulturzentrum Deutscher Sinti und Roma (Documentation and Culture Centre of the German Sinti and Roma) in Heidelberg.
/ Thursday, May 23, 2002
USC Shoah Foundation today mourns the loss of a close friend, George Weiss, a longtime volunteer with the Institute and a Holocaust survivor who endured homelessness and life on the run as a young child separated from his parents in both France and Belgium during the war. He was 87. Weiss was a familiar and beloved presence at the offices of the Institute, stopping in every week to curate and work with clips of video testimony from the Visual History Archive, which contains 55,000 life stories of survivors and witnesses to the Holocaust and other genocides.
/ Thursday, December 17, 2020
We are sorry to hear about the recent passing of Jim Sanders, who wrote a book chronicling his experience liberating Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Sanders was recognized by USC Shoah Foundation at its 2012 Ambassadors for Humanity gala, and he gave testimony to the Institute’s Visual History Archive.
/ Tuesday, March 6, 2018
To honor this remarkable man and visionary scholar, the Institute gratefully re-posts his profile below. During the brief week that Harry spent with us here in Los Angeles this past July as our inaugural Rutman Teaching Fellow, he managed to touch and inspire all of our staff and friends of the Institute who worked with him and who heard his public lecture.
/ Wednesday, July 23, 2014
Los Angeles, March 26, 2015 –  Echoes and Reflections, a comprehensive Holocaust education program that provides professional development and an array of resources for middle and high school teachers, is marking its 10th anniversary in 2015 with a strong trail of success behind it and ambitious goals for the future.
/ Thursday, March 26, 2015
On Tuesday, April 19, Celina Biniaz and Edith Umugiraneza will read poetry they’ve written about their experiences during the Holocaust and the Rwandan Genocide, respectively, in “When Memories Unfold: Poetry After Genocide.”
celina biniaz, defy, edith umugiraneza, Poetry Month / Thursday, April 14, 2016
Eighty-one years ago today Nazi soldiers and their collaborators committed one of the largest single massacres of the Holocaust with the murder of close to 33,000 Jews in the Babyn Yar ravine in Ukraine. The site of the atrocity on the outskirts of the capital Kyiv is now a memorial that people anywhere can visit with a new Virtual IWalk released by USC Shoah Foundation earlier this year. 
/ Thursday, September 29, 2022
Christopher R. Browning (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) 2018 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence “Holocaust History and Survivor Testimony: The Case of the Starachowice Factory Slave Labor Camp” March 29, 2018
cagr / Tuesday, May 1, 2018
“How the Holocaust’s Jewish Calendars Bear Witness” Alan Rosen (Recipient of the 2020 Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research) April 21, 2021
cagr / Monday, May 31, 2021
Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Yom HaShoah as it’s known in Hebrew, commemorates and honors the victims and survivors of the Holocaust. This year, people around the world will remember the victims of the Holocaust April 23- 24, 2017.
GAM, holocaust, Rememberance, yom hashoah, iwitness, op-eds / Monday, April 10, 2017
Auschwitz, the final destination of Jewish people from across Europe destined to be murdered as a part of the Nazi genocide of the Jews. Auschwitz, a place that housed prisoners of many religions, persuasions, minorities and nationalities, but whose evil reputation is seared onto our collective conscience because the five gas chambers at Birkenau were there for one reason only - to devour the lives of 960,000 Jews. Auschwitz, which has evolved into a universal symbol of man's inhumanity to man – and indeed it does remind us just how cruel human beings can be.
Auschwitz70, op-eds, antiSemitism / Wednesday, February 25, 2015
Born in Tunisia in 1940, Jacqueline Gmach left at the age of 18. Though her family was not directly in danger, the Nazi genocide remains deeply personal to her. She has devoted her career to educating people about its horrors as well as promoting the Jewish culture its executioners tried to obliterate. A scholar with degrees and credentials from institutions ranging from the Sorbonne in Paris to the University of Jerusalem and the University of Montreal, Gmach serves as project director for USC Shoah Foundation’s Testimonies of North Africa and the Middle East project.
Gmach, sephardi, mizrahi, collection, archive, vha / Friday, April 11, 2014
Postgraduate scholar Yuri Radchenko is focusing his research on the Holocaust in Ukraine – something he says he would have trouble doing if he didn’t have the Visual History Archive.
/ Monday, April 4, 2016
The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research hosted professors Marianne Hirsch (Columbia University) and Leo Spitzer (Dartmouth College), who gave a lecture based on their recently published book School Photos in Liquid Time: Reframing Difference.
cagr / Friday, March 6, 2020
Only a day after the University of Southern California announced that it would conduct a three-day test to move all classes online, which soon turned into a permanent arrangement until the end of Spring semester, my colleague and I gave our last in-person introduction to the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive to a USC class. Perhaps serendipitously, one of the topics discussed in this class was physical health.
cagr, op-eds, holocaust / Wednesday, April 1, 2020
As Hannah, in the novel The Devil's Arithmetic, needed to have a first-hand experience to fully understand the Holocaust; my students must be equipped with first-hand information, too. While they cannot "time travel" as Hannah does, they can hear from survivors to have a greater understanding of the Holocaust.
education, iwitness, Information Quests, op-eds / Thursday, September 17, 2015
Between 1938 and 1940 an estimated 17,000 mostly Austrian and German Jews traveled from Europe to Shanghai, many on luxury liners. They were escaping the upsurge of violent antisemitism in Europe and headed primarily to Shanghai, at the time one of the few places in the world without any immigration barriers.
/ Wednesday, April 26, 2023
The Institute mourns the passing of members of our community in 2020, including survivors who have given testimony Hanna Pankowsky, Dario Gabbai, Anneliese Nossbaum, Éva Székely, Itka Zygmuntowicz,
/ Wednesday, December 30, 2020
I found as a teacher that the most challenging task when teaching about the Holocaust and genocide, is how to do it not using material that shocks the students to the point that they do not want to look at the content, study the history or listen to present day issues due to the emotional shut down that can occur.
holocaust, education, iwitness, GAM, op-eds / Tuesday, December 15, 2015
Director of USC Shoah Foundation’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research Wolf Gruner will moderate a panel at UCLA exploring the historical and cultural contexts of the works of Rabbi Joachim Prinz and composer Kurt Weill right before World War II.
cagr, wolf gruner / Wednesday, January 11, 2017
Wilma Bulkin Siegel was seven years old in 1945 when her father took her to the movies to watch newsreels of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. “Why couldn’t I have done something about it?” she whispered to her father. Decades later, Siegel, a retired New York City oncologist and a pioneer in hospice care, has discovered a new tool for making an impact: a paintbrush.
/ Thursday, September 24, 2020
From the spring 2014 issue of PastForward: French film director and documentarian Claude Lanzmann visited USC Shoah Foundation for the first time this December, bringing with him his latest film and a simple request for the future.
claude lanzmann, pastforward / Monday, August 25, 2014
​We Share the Same Sky weaves together the stories of these two young women--Hana as a refugee who remains one step ahead of the Nazis at every turn, and Rachael, whose insatiable curiosity to touch the past guides her into the lives of countless strangers, bringing her love and tragic loss. Throughout the course of her twenties, Hana's history becomes a guidebook for Rachael in how to live a life empowered by grief.
/ Monday, August 9, 2021
One Day in Auschwitz is an hour-long documentary produced by USC Shoah Foundation and originally broadcast on Discovery on Jan. 27, 2015. It follows Holocaust survivor Kitty Hart-Moxon as she returns to Auschwitz-Birkenau with two high school students.
comcast, past is present, Auschwitz70, auschwitz / Wednesday, April 8, 2015
The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research and the International Institute for Holocaust Research, Yad Vashem wish to announce the third joint workshop for advanced PhD candidates working on Holocaust topics.
cagr / Tuesday, January 31, 2017
The documentary Two Sides of Survival just landed Winner of Best Documentary Short at the Angeles Film Festival. Produced by USC Shoah Foundation, Two Sides of Survival brings together stories from the East and West, chronicling how Jews who fled the Nazis in Europe, and Chinese who were threatened by Japanese occupation, improbably found refuge close to one another in the 1930’s and during World War II.
film, documentary, nanjing, holocaust / Wednesday, September 1, 2021

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