Speaker's series: Remember them! - 30 years of The Shoah Foundation

2024 saw a worldwide jump in antisemitism which spiked hand in hand with a jump in Holocaust denial. This increase came on top of an already frightening lack of information, as a  2020 study of young American adults showed: 59% of those surveyed did not know 6 million Jews perished in the Shoah; 56% did not know what Auschwitz Birkenau was and, maybe most disturbingly, 11 percent  believed Jews caused the Holocaust. Forty-nine percent, almost half of those surveyed (!),  encountered Holocaust denial or distortion on social media.

This is exactly what movie director Steven Spielberg foresaw while shooting his seminal movie “Schindler’s list” in 1992. He realized that the number of Shoah survivors were dwindling and that their stories would go with them. Fearing the loss or distortion of what happened during the Holocaust, Spielberg founded the Shoah Foundation in 1994 as an archive of oral history. 

Since its…