In just a few days, I’ll be graduating with my bachelors in International Relations from USC. As I sit here writing this piece, I have a chance to reflect on these three years of fundamental personal and academic growth, and in particular, on my incredibly rewarding intern experience at USC Shoah Foundation.

Members of the public can interact with New Dimensions in Testimony in its first un-moderated pilot at United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) now through Labor Day.

Matsuoka interviewed hundreds of Nanjing Massacre survivors and perpetrators and is nicknamed "the conscience of Japan."

Professor Atina Grossmann gave a public lecture co-hosted by the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research and the USC Max Kade Institute, offering a different reading of World War II and the Holocaust by mapping Jewish death, survival, and displacement via what she called the geographical margins – the colonial and semi-colonial regions including the Soviet interior, Central Asia, Iran, and British India.

Dan Stone, PhD, gave a public lecture at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, providing a glimpse into the work he has been doing on compressing the global history of concentration camps into 35,000 words to be published as part of the Very Short Introductions series by Oxford University Press.

The 2016-2017 Center Fellow at USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research will be Alexander Korb, Ph.D., director of the Stanley Burton Centre for Holocaust & Genocide Studies at the University of Leicester and scholar of the Holocaust in southeastern Europe.

Educators can finish the school year with a three-part online professional development course from Echoes and Reflections on teaching the Holocaust using testimony from the Visual History Archive and other primary and secondary sources.

A few weeks ago, a student I was interviewing for a profile I was writing on him for USC Shoah Foundation’s website said something interesting: “Growing up Jewish, the Holocaust is pretty much always there.”

I could identify. As someone who went to Hebrew school twice a week, every week, from the age of 5 to 13, the Holocaust was something I was always aware of. I was taught about it frequently, both in religious and regular school.

As the son of two survivors of the Shoah and the husband of a daughter of two survivors, identifying as the Next Generation has been the essence of who I am. It is the prism through which I see and evaluate all worldly events. It was particularly my father’s life that affected me the most. He truly was a “survivor." He survived the war running for his life through Russia, Siberian labor camps and other lands in Asia. He survived losing his parents, five of his sisters their husbands and children. He escaped from his hometown in the Russian sector to a displaced person camp in in the American sector. He survived as a refugee in Belgium and then as an immigrant in the United States. He survived the loss of his wife at a young age raising three children as a single parent in a foreign land.

Across the United States and in Europe, USC Shoah Foundation is helping to commemorate Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, on May 4 and 5.