USC Shoah Foundation: Preserving the Stories of More than 50,000 Holocaust Survivors

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USC Shoah Foundation: Preserving the…

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The USC Shoah Foundation is a nonprofit organization that has recorded and archived tens of thousands of audio and video testimonies by survivors of the Holocaust. It has also recorded and archived testimonials by survivors of other mass murders around the world. The foundation was founded in 1994 by movie director and producer Steven Spielberg, a year after he completed his Academy Award-winning film Schindler’s List.

Quote: “To accomplish our mission to develop empathy, understanding and respect through testimony, our programs focus on preserving and expanding our testimony collections; education through strategic partnerships; research on the history and prevention of genocide; and global outreach through compelling stories from the Visual History Archive.”
— USC Holocaust Foundation

Sources: Wikipedia, sfi.usc.edu/what-we-do

Learn more about the USC Shoah Foundation on Wikipedia. >>

Watch “USC Shoah Foundation Story – 2018 [4:56]. >>

Watch “USC Shoah Foundation: The Academy for Humanity [4:36]. >>

Visit the USC Shoah Foundaiton Website. >>

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Quotable

“[T]he foundations for extremism usually are held in check by various restraints. Societies are not liberal, moderate, progressive, and free because almost all their citizens – let alone their politicians — are liberal, moderate, progressive or committed to the freedoms of others.

“But societies consistently avoid extremism when the infrastructures of freedom are strong: when key institutions and norms encourage a more decent, rights-respective, lawful politics; when powerful social movements and independent media hold leaders to account, expose rather than reinforce political fantasies, and champion the rights of the vulnerable; and when information is produced and scrutinized by scholars, civil servants, and non-governmental organizations devoid of either government repression or vested interests.

“Yet no infrastructure is rigidly immovable, and once key components are eroded and weakened, once sections of the political and cultural elite attempt to mobilize the foundations of extremism, the system of restraints can swiftly collapse.

“While genocide on the scale of the Holocaust is historically exceptional, its central lesson is that the broader danger of extreme atrocities is not. In the words of the great historian Ian Kershaw, the Holocaust ‘lit a warning beacon that still burns brightly: it showed how a modern, advanced, cultured society can so rapidly sink into barbarity… It showed what we are capable of.’ Only by rejecting false narratives of conflict and polarization, and maintaining systems of rights and freedoms for all, can we hope to prevent that capability from once more becoming a reality.”

— Jonathan Leader Maynard in his incisive article “Could It Happen Here?: The Holocaust and Atrocities in the 21st Century” To read the entire article, click here.