Museum of Tolerance Places ‘Moral Space’ Above Aesthetics

While some museum efforts to diversify may smack of political correctness, many museum officials believe they have a moral responsibility to foster ethnic inclusion and cooperation. Nowhere is that more explicit than at the year-old Simon Wiesenthal Center Museum of Tolerance on Wilshire Boulevard in West Los Angeles.

Much of the museum is devoted to documenting the horrors of Hitler’s war against the Jews, but the museum also includes interactive exhibits on the history and consequences of all kinds of intolerance.

Although the museum is opposed on principle to tracking the ethnicity of its visitors, it has “a very high minority attendance,” said director Gerald Margolis.

He attributes the museum’s popularity with minorities to the fact that it speaks so viscerally to their experiences with exhibits on slavery, the civil rights struggle and discrimination against Mexicans, Asians and others.

The Museum of Tolerance aspires to be a “moral space,” said Margolis, while most art museums are “aesthetic spaces.”

On Monday, the Museum of Tolerance hosted an event unusual even in an era of ethnic outreach. It was the scene of a dinner at which Castlemont High School in Oakland was given a “Courage to Care” award by Gov. Pete Wilson.

Last month, a group of African American and Latino students from Castlemont were thrown out of a Bay Area movie theater for jeering during a scene in “Schindler’s List” in which a Jewish woman is slain. The theater audience, which included Holocaust survivors, was horrified.

The school’s response to the incident was lauded at Monday’s ceremony. As Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the museum, said: “As soon as the school realized they had a problem, they dealt with it honestly and forthrightly.”

The school took the occasion to teach the students about the Holocaust and to institute a program on racism and anti-Semitism. The Castlemont students also made a public apology.

Castlemont Principal Ellen Posey accepted the award.