- Person
- Steven Spielberg
- Lived
- b. 1946
- Field
- Film
- From
- American
The story
Steven Spielberg, born in 1946 to a Jewish family, is one of the most influential filmmakers in history. In 1993 he released Schindler's List, the story of Oskar Schindler, a German businessman who saved more than a thousand Jews from the Holocaust. The film won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Spielberg's first as Best Director.
Making the film brought Spielberg into contact with Holocaust survivors, and he decided to use proceeds from it to preserve their stories. In 1994 he founded the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation to videotape interviews with survivors "before it was too late". Working with Holocaust scholars, its teams recorded testimonies in 56 countries and 32 languages. Over 50,000 survivors were interviewed in the first five years, and by 2001 the foundation had collected 52,000 testimonies.
In January 2006 the foundation moved from trailers at Universal Studios to the University of Southern California and became the USC Shoah Foundation. Its Visual History Archive, digitised from 2008, now holds 60,394 searchable testimonies from survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust and of other genocides, including the Armenian, Rwandan, Cambodian and Guatemalan genocides and the Nanjing Massacre. It is the largest such collection in the world. Its Dimensions in Testimony project uses three-dimensional recording so that students can ask questions of interactive survivor biographies and hear answers in their own words.
The foundation uses the testimonies in education and research to confront antisemitism and hatred. Scholars have used the archive to teach hundreds of university courses, and the foundation reports that its programmes have reached some 407,000 educators and 27 million students. In 2024 viewers watched 138 million minutes of testimony on YouTube.
Its work continues as the last survivors grow fewer. After the attacks of 7 October 2023 in Israel, the foundation began recording testimonies from survivors and witnesses, and it has launched a laboratory devoted to countering antisemitism today.
Why it matters
Spielberg's archive ensures that tens of thousands of survivors' voices will keep teaching students long after the last witnesses are gone.
About Steven Spielberg
Filmmaker; defined modern blockbuster cinema and produced "Schindler's List." Founded the Shoah Foundation.
More about Steven Spielberg
- Spielberg helped create the Scouts' cinematography badgeSteven Spielberg, who made an early 8 mm Western to earn a Scout photography badge, helped the Boy Scouts of America create a cinematography merit badge, launched in 1989.
- Spielberg's Lincoln told how slavery was abolishedSteven Spielberg's 2012 film Lincoln dramatised the passage of the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery, and the National Archives honoured him for it in 2013.
- Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan earned a Pentagon medalSteven Spielberg made Saving Private Ryan as a tribute to the generation that fought in the Second World War, and in 1999 the Pentagon gave him its Distinguished Public Service Medal.
Steven Spielberg in the news
Sources
- USC Shoah Foundation: Our Journey USC Shoah Foundation
- Steven Spielberg Wikipedia
- USC Shoah Foundation Wikipedia
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