USC Shoah Foundation Scholars and Staff Participating in Association of Holocaust Organizations Conference

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 is an international network of organizations and individuals for the advancement of Holocaust education, remembrance and research. It holds an annual conference and seminars, and maintains a listserv and directory for members. This year’s conference is focused on the Holocaust in Eastern Europe.

Michael Berenbaum, PhD, Executive Director of the USC Shoah Foundation from 1997-1999, will be part of the panel discussion Holocaust Education in Europe: The Good and the Bad. Berenbaum is the director of the Sigi Ziering Institute at American Jewish University, which researches the religious, ethical and legal implications of the Holocaust.

Wendy Lower, PhD, will give a presentation on the research from her latest book, Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Lower has conducted research in USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive for over a decade and is serving on the steering committee for its upcoming international conference, “Memory, Media and Technology: Exploring the Trajectories of Schindler’s List,” Nov. 16-18, 2014. She teaches at Claremont McKenna College.

The conference will also include the presentation Holocaust by Bullets: Teaching the Holocaust to Prevent Mass Killings and Genocide Today by Father Patrick Desbois, who delivered the keynote address at USC Shoah Foundation's 2012 Yom Hashoah Commemoration. Father Desbois is president of Yahad-In Unum, which conducts research and documentation of mass shootings that took place in Ukraine, Belarus, and Poland. The organization has collected testimony from more than 2,000 witnesses to these massacres and identified hundreds of mass graves, many of which were previously unknown, and has created educational materials and exhibitions using the testimonies.

Kori Street, PhD, Director of Education at the USC Shoah Foundation, will also be in attendance.