Harry Reicher of the University of Pennsylvania Law School has been named as the recipient of the USC Shoah Foundation-The Institute for Visual History and Education’s inaugural Rutman Teaching Fellowship.

Reicher will spend one week at the USC Shoah Foundation on the campus of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles to interact with the institute’s leaders and experts on the Visual History Archive to learn how to best teach with the institute’s testimonies by Holocaust survivors. He will present a lecture at USC on his intended use of the testimonies. Also, Reicher will present a lecture at Penn.

As a Fellow, he will utilize the institute’s Visual History Archive in his Penn Law course “Law and the Holocaust,” which examines the Nazi philosophy of law emanating from racial ideology. The testimonies will help emphasize how the legal system set in place by the National Socialist regime dehumanized a particular demographic of its citizens, creating a new way in which students can examine the historic laws and how they personally affected individuals. 

The USC Shoah Foundation and the University of Pennsylvania partnered in the spring of 2012 when, through the Penn Libraries, the University became the first institution in Pennsylvania to provide access to nearly 52,000 eyewitnesses testimonies of the Holocaust, Rwandan Tutsi Genocide and Nanjing Massacre. The Archive is available on Penn Libraries’ Web site at http://guides.library.upenn.edu/content.php?pid=292757&sid=2403527.

The Rutman Teaching Fellowship was established by Penn alum Lori Rutman Fife in memory of her parents, Henry and Sherry Rutman.

Additional information about the  USC Shoah Foundation is available at sfi.usc.edu.