On 25 March 2024, US filmmaker Steven Spielberg delivered a sobering address at the University of Southern California (USC) to mark the 30th anniversary of the USC Shoah Foundation. Founded by Spielberg in 1994 following the release of his Academy Award-winning film Schindler’s List, the foundation has spent three decades archiving the oral and visual testimonies of survivors. During the anniversary ceremony, USC President Carol Folt presented the University Medallion – the institution’s highest honour – to recognise the thousands of survivors whose eyewitness accounts form the core of the foundation’s Visual History Archive.
The medallion was accepted on behalf of the survivors by 92-year-old Celina Biniaz. Biniaz, who escaped the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp at the age of 13, was one of the youngest individuals placed on Oskar Schindler’s life-saving employment list. Her parents also worked in Schindler’s factory, shielding the family from the extermination apparatus of the Third Reich. Addressing the audience alongside Spielberg, Biniaz articulated the dual impact of the German industrialist and the American filmmaker on her life. “Oskar Schindler gave me my life, but Steven Spielberg gave me my voice,” she stated, underscoring the vital role the Shoah Foundation has played in enabling survivors to process and publicly share their trauma.
The USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive represents a colossal undertaking in historical preservation. It contains over 56,000 audio-visual testimonies, recorded across 65 countries and conducted in 44 different languages. The archive is fully digitised, with testimonies indexed down to the minute using over 70,000 specific subject terms. While it was initially conceived to document the experiences of Jewish survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust, the foundation has since expanded its mandate. The archive now houses testimonies from survivors of the Armenian Genocide, the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, the Cambodian Genocide, and the Nanjing Massacre.
In his address, Spielberg pivoted from the foundation’s archival achievements to the immediate political climate, expressing profound concern over surging antisemitism and the proliferation of extremist ideologies, particularly within academic institutions. “We see every day how the machinery of extremism is being used on college campuses,” Spielberg observed. He explicitly linked contemporary political rhetoric to the historical precedents documented in the foundation’s archive. “The creation of the ‘other,’ and the dehumanization of any group based on their differences, is the foundation of fascism,” he warned.
Spielberg emphasised that the empirical work of the USC Shoah Foundation is more urgent today than it was at its inception in 1994. He invoked the oft-quoted maxim regarding the perils of forgetting the past, adding a personal layer of apprehension about the trajectory of modern society. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” he said. “And I am increasingly alarmed that we may be condemned to repeat history, to once again have to fight for the very right to be Jewish.” This urgency aligns with broader cultural efforts to preserve historical truth, such as the ongoing legal and moral battles to reclaim stolen family art from the shadows of history.
The filmmaker also addressed the broader geopolitical landscape, specifically the ongoing conflict in the Middle East following the Hamas attacks on Israel. He advocated for a nuanced moral stance that rejects binary thinking, arguing that condemning terrorist violence and mourning civilian casualties are not mutually exclusive positions. “We can rage against the heinous acts committed by the terrorists of Oct. 7 and also decry the killing of innocent women and children in Gaza,” Spielberg stated. “This makes us a unique force for good in the world.”
By continuously collecting these narratives, the USC Shoah Foundation aims to counteract historical revisionism and provide an irrefutable educational resource for future generations, researchers, and policymakers. As filmmakers and artists continue to embed complex historical and moral themes within their commercial work, an approach visible when decoding the symbolism in famous films, the direct preservation of eyewitness testimony remains a distinct and irreplaceable mechanism against what Spielberg termed the “corrosive power of hatred.” The 30th anniversary event served not merely as a retrospective of a monumental archival project, but as an active deployment of history against the encroaching shadow of contemporary extremism.
