USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education was founded to capture the voices, emotions and faces of those who suffered, yet miraculously survived the most heinous crime ever committed against humanity by humanity. The idea was to record individual and collective memories that would be preserved in perpetuity as a seminal educational tool to inform current and future generations that incitement, hate and violence against a person or a group can ultimately lead to death, genocide and ultimately extermination.

The fast pace of globalization with all of its benefits is also accelerating the viral spread of hatred. Where once regional enmities brewed for centuries with sporadic outbursts of warfare and imperial powers that waxed and waned, the truly global speed and scale of ideological hatred and international conflict was not possible until recently for many practical reasons.

USC Shoah Foundation Executive Director Stephen Smith gave the keynote address at a conference with Holocaust educators located at the site of the Warsaw Ghetto. In the U.K, he attended events celebrating the launch of the Visual History Archive at the University of Oxford. USC Shoah Foundation Director of Global Outreach Karen Jungblut was also in Poland and then attended an event in Hungary to celebrate the launch of the Visual History Archive at 40 Hungarian institutions.