LOS ANGELES — Steven Spielberg's earliest blockbusters — "Jaws," "E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial," "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" — avoided any hint of ethnicity. It was only with the release of "Schindler's List" in 1993 and its aftermath that Spielberg publicly confronted being Jewish.

"Anti-Semitism affected me deeply; it made me feel I wasn't safe outside my own door," said Spielberg, who is now commemorating the 10th anniversary of the Shoah Foundation, an outgrowth of "Schindler's List" that has collected large numbers of video testimonies from Holocaust survivors.

Discussing the taunts and ugly incidents of his childhood, Spielberg, 57, said: "It happened in affluent neighborhoods in Arizona and California, where I was one of the few Jewish students. I didn't experience it in more lower-middle-class environments in New Jersey and Ohio."

Once, in a silent study hall of 100 students, several of them pitched pennies around his desk to taunt him, Spielberg said quietly. "I have vivid memories of that," he said. The hallways, too, could be an ordeal: "A lot of kids coughed the word 'Jew' in their hands as they walked by me between classes."

Those memories and the experience of making "Schindler's List" led to the foundation, officially called the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. "When we started it, we were in a race against time because of the ages of the average Holocaust survivor," Spielberg said.

In that sense, he said, the race is over because the foundation has collected nearly 52,000 remembrances, or testimonies, from people who survived the concentration camps.

But in another sense, Spielberg said, the mission has never seemed more urgent. "We are in a race against time for the conscious minds of young people," he said, because youths need to learn "the dangers of stereotyping, the dangers of discrimination, the dangers of racial and religious hatred and vengeful rage."

Spielberg spoke expansively and somewhat bleakly, mindful of recent incidents of anti-Semitism in France and elsewhere, in his offices on the Universal lot in Universal City. The spot is not far from the simple, Quonset-hut-style enclave in which the Shoah Foundation collects, catalogs and indexes the eyewitness accounts and makes documentaries, classroom videos, CD-ROMs and other materials. Shoah is the Hebrew word for "annihilation" or "catastrophe" and has come to be used to refer to the Holocaust.