USC Shoah Foundation
The USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education is a nonprofit organization founded by filmmaker Steven Spielberg in 1994 to record, preserve, and disseminate video testimonies from survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust, known in Hebrew as the Shoah.[1][2] Inspired by encounters with survivors during the production of his film Schindler's List, Spielberg established the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, which conducted over 51,000 interviews in 32 languages across 56 countries by 2006, when it affiliated with the University of Southern California and adopted its current name.[1][3]
The foundation's core achievement is the Visual History Archive, a digital repository now exceeding 55,000 audiovisual testimonies that provide firsthand accounts of personal experiences before, during, and after genocidal events.[4] While initially dedicated exclusively to Holocaust documentation, the institute has since expanded to include survivor narratives from other atrocities, such as the Armenian Genocide, the Nanjing Massacre, and the Rwandan Genocide, with the aim of fostering education to counter prejudice and intolerance through testimony-based learning.[5][6] These resources support scholarly research, classroom instruction, and public outreach at partner institutions worldwide, emphasizing the evidentiary value of direct witness statements over secondary interpretations.[3][7]