Museum of Tolerance

The Museum of Tolerance is one of the few museums in the country designed as an experience with a moral argument at its center, and it is among the more serious visits in Los Angeles. Run by the Simon Wiesenthal Center and open since 1993, it sits on Pico Boulevard in West Los Angeles, outside the usual tourist circuit and well worth the detour. The Holocaust section is the heart of the building: visitors move through a sequence of rooms that follow the rise of Nazism and the destruction of Europe's Jews, and are given the identity of a child whose fate they discover at the end. Around it, other galleries address prejudice, civil rights and the responsibilities of ordinary people in the present. Survivors often speak to visitors on scheduled days, which is the memory most people carry out of the building.

The museum was conceived as a way to bring a difficult history to people who might not otherwise engage with it, and its design shows that purpose. Rather than lining a corridor with panels, it asks the visitor to take part. In the Holocaust section you pass through reconstructed environments, from a street in prewar Berlin to the machinery of persecution, and follow a chronology that is told through documents, film and recorded testimony.

Many visitors say the child's identity card they are given at the start is what makes the history personal: you reach the end of the section and learn what became of the child you have been following. The effect is quiet rather than theatrical, and the staff are careful and humane in how they handle it.

Other parts of the museum look at the wider questions the Holocaust raises. Galleries on contemporary prejudice and the civil rights era ask visitors to examine bias in their own lives, and there are exhibitions on genocide and human rights after 1945 and on individuals who stood up when it counted. Programs change, and special exhibitions can be substantial, so it is worth checking what is on before you go.

When a survivor is speaking, the session is usually scheduled into the day and is among the most valuable things you can attend; ask at the desk about timing, since the testimony programs are part of what the museum does best.

It is suitable for teenagers and adults, and the museum advises parents to consider whether younger children are ready for the Holocaust section. Many visitors pair it with the nearby Getty Center or a walk through Century City; the day is also a good counterweight to the lighter parts of a Los Angeles trip, and it pairs thoughtfully with the 9/11 Memorial and Museum or the National Museum of African American History and Culture on a broader museum itinerary.