USC President C. L. Max Nikias praised USC Shoah Foundation Executive Director Stephen Smith’s dedication to preserving memory of the past through testimony.

We are sad to learn of the passing of Thomas Blatt, a Holocaust survivor who was one of the few people to survive an escape from the Sobibor death camp in 1943. He was 88.

Born April 15, 1927, in Lublin, Poland, Blatt also served as a witness at the 2009 trial of the camp guard John Demjanjuk.

USC Shoah Foundation is sorry to learn of the passing of Aleksander Laks, the first Holocaust survivor to give his testimony to USC Shoah Foundation in Brazil and a special friend of the Institute. Laks passed away July 21 at age 88.

Laks survived the Lodz Ghetto, Auschwitz and a death march as a teenager. He immigrated to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and became a leader of the survivor community there as president of the Sherit Hapleita (Holocaust survivors’ organization).

Cornell marked the launch Wed., Nov. 3 with a public lecture by New Yorker columnist and Rwandan Genocide expert Philip Gourevitch.

If you’ve ever watched genocide survivor testimony from the Visual History Archive and it spurred you to wonder what you can do to help prevent acts of intolerance and inhumanity, USC Shoah Foundation has an opportunity for you this holiday season.

About a year after I joined USC Shoah Foundation, I was invited to be the keynote speaker at the Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre’s Holocaust Education Week in Toronto. The theme that year was about memory and they had graciously invited me, the new Director of Education, to discuss memory in the context of the Institute’s education platform IWitness and testimony-based education.

Members of the USC Shoah Foundation Board of Councilors got creative during the annual board meeting in New York, Oct. 14-15.

USC Shoah Foundation executive staff, supporters and partners met in China this week for the 2015 USC Global Conference, where they shared the Institute’s mission and newest projects with an international audience.

During the weekend of October 10-11, the University of Southern California gathered international academics, musicians and members of the Los Angeles community for a symposium and series of events, collectively called Singing in the Lion’s Mouth: Music as Resistance to Genocide. Hosted by Professor Wolf Gruner of the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, and Professor Nick Strimple of the USC Thornton School of Music, the symposium, film screening and concert were also sponsored by USC’s Vision and Voices arts and humanities initiative. The following paragraphs are a reflection on the individual events that made up the weekend, and an exploration into the larger ideas raised in discussions over the course of the weekend.

Educators looking for strategies and best practices for teaching using testimonies from the Visual History Archive can refer to a new guide published on the IWitness website.