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| Established | 1993 |
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| Location | 9786 W. Pico Blvd Los Angeles, California, United States |
| Type | Holocaust memorials, racism and prejudice museum |
| Visitors | 350,000 annually |
| Website | www |
TheMuseum of Tolerance (MOT), also known asBeit HaShoah ("House of the Holocaust"), is amultimediamuseum inLos Angeles,California,United States, designed to examineracism andprejudice around the world with a strong focus on the history ofthe Holocaust. The museum was established in 1993, as the educational arm of human rights organization, theSimon Wiesenthal Center.[1] The museum also deals with atrocities inCambodia andLatin America,[2] along with issues likebullying andhate crimes.[3] The museum has an associated museum and professional development multi-media training facility inNew York City.
The museum is closed on Saturdays, theJewish day of rest[4] and on all majorJewish holidays andUnited States public holidays.
The original museum inLos Angeles, California, opened in 1993. It was built at a cost of $50 million by theSimon Wiesenthal Center, named after its founderSimon Wiesenthal, aHolocaust survivor andNazi hunter.[2] The museum receives 350,000 visitors annually, about a third of which are school-age children. The museum's most talked-about exhibit is "The Holocaust Section", where visitors are divided into groups to take their own place in some of the events ofWorld War II. The museum also features testimonies of Holocaust survivors, often from live volunteers who tell their stories and answer questions. People also get cards with pictures of Jewish children on them and at the end of the museum trip, it is revealed whether the child on the card survived or was murdered in the Holocaust.
In addition, the museum features a "Tolerancenter" that discusses issues of prejudice in everyday life, a Multimedia Learning Center, Finding Our Families – Finding Ourselves, a collection of archives and documents, various temporary exhibits such as Los Angeles visual artist Bill Cormalis Jr's"'A' Game In The B Leagues", which documents through paintings, the Civil Rights Movement during the segregation of colored people inMajor League Baseball, and an Arts and Lectures Program.
A classroom visit to the museum is featured in the 2007 movieFreedom Writers, based on the real-life story of high school teacherErin Gruwell and her students. The museum was parodied in an episode ofSouth Park called "The Death Camp of Tolerance".
Over 350,000 people visit the museum annually, including 110,000 children.[4]
The museum runs a program calledThe Museums Tools for Tolerance (r) for Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice Professional. Through its inception in 1996, it has trained over 75,000 law enforcement officers. The success of the program led to the creation of the New York Tolerance Center.[5]
In the past, some journalists and academics have criticized the way the Museum deals with its exhibits; Oren Baruch Stier, who specializes inHolocaust research andJewish studies,[6] criticized the museum in 1996 for not contextualizing the Holocaust. He argued against the separation of the museum's "tolerance" section and its area dedicated to the Holocaust.[7] In 2003, Christopher Reynolds wrote, for theLos Angeles Times, that the museum lacked any exhibit about theArmenian genocide.[8]Political theoristWendy Brown critiqued the museum in a chapter of her 2009 bookRegulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire; in the book, Brown analyzed "tolerance as a museum object", and made connections between theIsraeli–Palestinian conflict andgenocide directed at non-Jewish groups. She thought that the experience of the museum could make its visitors more vigilant against social prejudice andstereotyping.[4]
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