Another year dominated by the ongoing pandemic draws to a close. From producing animated films to conducting interviews, forging new partnerships and sharing incredible testimonies, 2021 was a year to remember. Here are some of the highlights of the work the Institute has accomplished.
/ Thursday, December 16, 2021
January 18, 2012: Resistance during the Holocaust is still mostly seen in terms of organized or armed group activities, yet this perspective overlooks individual acts of opposition. Up to now, the availability of sources for analyzing the behavior of German Jews has been limited. Historians used reports originated by the Nazi state and/or written post-war testimonies. In those sources individual acts of opposition barely emerge. However, a closer analysis of the micro level of Nazi society challenges the common image of German Jews as passive victims.
presentation / Wednesday, December 11, 2013
Theodore Zev Weiss Holocaust Educational Foundation Professor at Northwestern University Peter Hayes examines antisemitism and homophobia as central components of Nazi racism.
presentation / Friday, March 13, 2015
Rescue is a crucial topic in understanding genocide survival and appreciating the difficult choices that people make in extreme circumstances. Although many stories of survival during the Holocaust are due to unexplained and unexplainable circumstances, there are also numerous accounts of individual and group acts of aid and rescue that contributed to the survival of thousands of Jewish people.
rescue, résistance / Tuesday, September 16, 2014
The USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research is proud to announce its cooperation with a German government funded multi-institutional Holocaust research project entitled #LastSeen - Pictures of Nazi Deportations.
cagr / Wednesday, April 20, 2022
Staff and scholars of the USC Shoah Foundation will participate in discussion about the latest in Holocaust studies at the Association of Holocaust Organizations (AHO)’s 29th annual conference this week in St. Petersburg, Fla.
aho, patrick desbois, wendy lower, kori street, michael berenbaum / Wednesday, June 4, 2014
In this clip, Henry Sinason, a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, recalls how widespread Nazi antisemitic propaganda was all over the city where he lived.
propaganda, antiSemitism / Tuesday, August 1, 2017
USC Shoah Foundation and the Maimonides Institute for Medicine, Ethics and the Holocaust are partnering to develop new and innovative educational programing on medical ethics and the Holocaust. The Holocaust marked a profound and sadistic deviation from traditional notions of medical ethics, with medical and scientific communities in the Third Reich actively participating in the labeling, persecution and eventual mass murder of millions deemed “unfit.”
/ Friday, July 30, 2021
The medical experiments of Josef Mengele on concentration camp prisoners are well known and documented – but journalist Arthur Allen has written a new book, with help from the Visual History Archive, about two little-known doctors whose experiments actually saved lives and were in themselves acts of defiance against the Nazis.
/ Tuesday, July 22, 2014
Today marks the launch of #BeginsWithMe, a social media campaign led by USC Shoah Foundation that encourages people to share what they will do to learn from the Holocaust and help fight prejudice and intolerance.
beginswithme, Auschwitz70 / Monday, January 5, 2015
Teresa Walch, the 2016-2017 Inaugural Robert J. Katz Research Fellow in Genocide Studies, gave a public lecture at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research focusing on the calculated and gradual exclusion of Jews from public spaces and ultimately from their own homes that began in the 1930s.
cagr / Thursday, March 2, 2017
Making DiT accessible at no-cost to educators and students through IWitness provides students anywhere in the world with the opportunity to have a conversational experience with survivors of the Holocaust and other witnesses to history. And at the Holocaust & Genocide Centres in Johannesburg and Durban, that’s exactly what students did, with a total of 400 learners interfacing with an interactive recorded video of Pinchas, a Jewish survivor of six Nazi concentration camps.
education, Pinchas Gutter, Dimensions in Testimony / Wednesday, February 16, 2022
Maximilian Strnad, a young German scholar who is currently a fellow at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s research center, gave a public lecture at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research focusing on the experiences of the last remaining Jews under the German Reich — intermarried Jews.
cagr / Monday, November 30, 2015
This clip reel features several Holocaust survivors talking about the antisemitism they experienced in relation to the sports they played during the Nazi era in Germany.
/ Wednesday, October 2, 2019
 In commemoration of International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 70th anniversary of the liberation of AuschwitzJoin us for the US film premiere of "German Concentration Camps Factual Survey" Museum of Tolerance9786 W. Pico Blvd., Los AngelesTuesday, January 27 at 7 p.m. Presented by Museum of Tolerance, USC Shoah Foundation with the support of the British Council
/ Friday, January 23, 2015
The risk of the Holocaust is not that it will be forgotten, but that it will be embalmed and surrounded by monuments and used to absolve all future sins.   - Zygmunt Bauman 2018 Polish-Israeli Crisis: History, Trauma, and Politics of Cultural Memory The future of Polish-Israeli relations can be driven by compassion and forgiveness, or a retreat behind walls of fossilized antisemitism, essentialist prejudice, nationalistic egotism, and fear. 1968-2018
antiSemitism / Tuesday, February 6, 2018
Professor Marion Kaplan, 2018-2019 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, gave the annual Shapiro Scholar public lecture on gender and the Holocaust.
cagr / Wednesday, May 1, 2019
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.
/ Monday, November 9, 2020
As part of the program, 100 survivors of Auschwitz, the German Nazi concentration and extermination camp, will travel to Poland to attend and participate in the official observance of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on Jan. 27, 2015.
past is present, world jewish congress, wjc, auschwitz / Monday, September 15, 2014
There is a current controversy about the allegation that the great mufti of Jerusalem instigated the final solution of the Nazis. While there is no doubt that Haj Amin al-Husseini, was a virulent anti-Semite, history shows that the Final Solution was conceived and implemented by Nazis and nobody else.
Haj Amin al-Husseini, holocaust, GAM, op-eds, cagr / Thursday, October 22, 2015
Jean-Marc Dreyfus, PhD, Reader in Holocaust Studies in the History department at the University of Manchester (United Kingdom) has been awarded the 2018-2019 Center Research Fellowship.
cagr, jean-marc dreyfus / Monday, February 5, 2018
Kurt, an American soldier, and Gerda, a Holocaust survivor, recall how they met the day Kurt liberated her from a derelict factory where Nazi soldiers abandoned her and other women during a death march.
liberation, clip reel, death march, Kurt Klein, gerda klein / Tuesday, January 2, 2018
Holocaust survivor Gloria Lachman remembers Nazi soldiers appearing at her house and physically forcing her grandmother to vote for Hitler, an experience that caused her to deeply value the right to vote.
clip, election / Monday, November 7, 2016
In the 1980s, a tiny woman in her 50s named Ruth Westheimer shocked and delighted the world with her blunt advice – delivered in a grandmotherly German accent – about sex. She became a media sensation and remains a household name as “Dr. Ruth.” Less known is her perilous journey to get there – a story that includes her survival of the Holocaust and immigration to British-controlled Mandatory Palestine, where she briefly became a sniper in a Jewish paramilitary force.
/ Wednesday, May 22, 2019
Elizabeth Holtzman, who is the subject of an IWitness activity, is among four Homeland Security advisory council members who resigned in protest of the U.S. government’s policy of separating children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border.
child separation, immigration, refugees, Elizabeth Holtzman, Homeland Security, Nazis, war crimes / Friday, July 20, 2018
The Holocaust Memorial Center in Budapest has launched a one-year long Fellowship Program in Holocaust Education for curriculum developers and teacher trainers.The Fellowship – a unique initiative in Hungary - is a yearlong program during which participants have to develop their own project in Holocaust Education. The major milestones of the year include a one-week intensive seminar, individual and group consultations, a four-day study tour to Holocaust-related sites, and a closing conference.
/ Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Famed musician and Holocaust survivor Victor Borge describes how he was targeted by Nazi sympathizers in Denmark. They harrassed him at his concerts, attacked him in the street, and published articles about him in their papers.
clip / Wednesday, November 18, 2015
Edith Lowy describes how her family hid during the Holocaust and after a series of event, the family decided to voluntarily march into the nearby labor camp to avoid the consequences of being caught by the Nazis.
clip, female, edith lowy, jewish survivor, hiding / Monday, January 25, 2016
The 10-part Echoes and Reflections series continues with Lesson 9: Perpetrators, Collaborators and Bystanders
echoes and reflections, education, teaching, visual history archive, testimony, holocaust / Friday, November 15, 2013
Holocaust survivor testimony to enhance education initiative in the Czech Republic In the Czech Republic, Holocaust survivors’ eyewitness testimonies will soon be used to teach a different aspect of local history: the imprisonment of Czechoslovak citizens in the Soviet Gulag.
/ Wednesday, September 12, 2012

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