(JTA) — The USC Shoah Foundation will recognize President Obama with its highest honor.
Film producer Steven Spielberg, the institute’s founder and a trustee at the University of Southern California, will present Obama with the Ambassador for Humanity Award “for his global efforts to protect human rights, his commitment to education and expanding educational technology, and his work advancing opportunities for all people,” the foundation announced Friday in a statement.
Obama will serve as the featured speaker at the foundation’s 20th anniversary gala on May 7.
In the statement, Spielberg noted the president’s recent appointment of the first special envoy for Holocaust survivor services in the United States and said it “demonstrates his staunch commitment to honoring the past while building a better future.”
Spielberg established the Shoah Foundation-The Institute for Visual History and Education after completing the Academy Award-winning film “Schindler’s List” to collect and preserve the video testimonies of survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust. The nearly 52,000 eyewitness testimonies in 34 languages and from 58 countries make the foundation’s archive one of the largest digital collections of its kind in the world.
