Steven Spielberg Philanthropy

In Hollywood, Steven Spielberg wields considerable clout as moviemaker par excellence, both as a director and a producer. He founded the highly successful studio DreamWorks SKG with Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen.

Until Steven Spielberg released Schindler’s List in 1993, nobody truly reckoned him to be anyone other than a director who made movies with amazing special effects. The success of Schindler’s List put rest to the notion that Steven Spielberg was not a “serious director,” winning him his first Oscar for Best Director. The film itself was honored as the year’s Best Picture. Schindler’s List created a stirring and unforgettable portrait of the Holocaust.

Exploring the Holocaust was not just a one-shot project for Steven Spielberg, however. A year after making Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg funded the Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education.

Patterned after Yale University’s Fortunoff Video Archive, the Shoah Foundation gathers the testimonies, experiences, and eyewitness accounts of those who survived the Holocaust. Among those interviewed were Jews, political prisoners, rescuers, liberators, homosexuals, Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and participants in war crime trials.

These testimonies are compiled in the foundation’s massive Visual History Archive, a 200-terabyte software medium from which one can retrieve the footages. Housed at the University of Southern California, the Visual History Archive contains over 50,000 testimonies culled from over fifty countries and spoken in thirty-two languages, making it the largest of its kind in the world. The foundation has also produced movie documentaries to educate school children about the heartrending event.

The Shoah Foundation Institute has broadened its scope to encompass the horrors of other crimes against humanity, such as the genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda. In its own way, the archive has chronicled the extraordinary resilience of the human spirit in the face of evil.

Spielberg used his profits from Schindler’s List to establish the Righteous Persons Foundation in 1994. The foundation has awarded hundreds of grants in the fields of education, arts, culture, spirituality, Holocaust awareness, tolerance, interfaith relations, and synagogue life.

No related posts.