Courtesy of The Righteous Persons Foundation

Steven Spielberg b. 1946

Many of the most widely-acclaimed and highest-grossing movies of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries bear the influence of Steven Spielberg. As director, Spielberg created such successful filmic masterpieces as Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and E.T.: The Extraterrestrial, among so many others. He produced and directed Schindler's List, which won seven Academy Awards in 1993, including Best Picture and Best Director. Building on his interest in Holocaust studies and survivors' experiences, the following year Spielberg launched the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation to record oral-history testimony from Holocaust survivors.