Is the Museum of Tolerance Itself Tolerant?

The Museum of Tolerance is a large museum that focuses on racism and prejudice. It is also home to a memoriam of the Holocaust. The museum attempts to crack the barriers of racism, prejudices, and discrimination. I had never previously visited the Museum of Tolerance before this class. I have been told of how it was mostly notorious for its Holocaust exhibit and its messages prejudice. From personal experience, the Museum of Tolerance appeared to be a popular place to visit and a place people often talk about or reference within conversations. The many exhibits in the museum expose the guests to different types of prejudice, hatred, and discriminations. Upon entrance to the museum there was a security checkpoint.

In this book, the author describes the long process it takes to create a national museum that will commemorate the Holocaust. He covers issues such as, the location of it, the design and construction aspects of the museum building. He informs readers about how they’ve tried to represent the Holocaust through the museum with sensitivity. I will use specific facts from this book to show that this museum was built with the help of many and required a lot of thought into it. I will show that this museum does in fact show sensitivity to an individual.

The Dallas Holocaust Museum is the the heart of downtown Dallas and is tucked away on a busy downtown street. This was my first time visiting the museum and it was an amazing experience. The tour started off with a pillar representation of the number of Jews killed during the twelve-year time period known as the Holocaust. I was unaware of the fact that eighty-percent of the Jews killed during the Holocaust happened in the year 1942. The tour opened my eyes to more of the personal accounts instead of just the vast number of deaths during this genocide.

The Museum of Tolerance was an awesome experience for me and for all the 8th graders. We learned about the children of the holocaust , the Anne frank exhibit , and about WWll. I really like the part where there were words and it made Anne's face and she was facing the Hollywood hills and I learned that she wanted to be an actor and wanted to go to Hollywood. The most memorable parts was when we went into the gas chamber. It was just an unbelievable sensation it gave me the chills being in there and seeing that dark grey room. One of the less well know children of the holocaust was Monia Levisnski from Lithuania. I got her as I my kid when they gave us little cards. Sadly he died along with 1.5 million other children. So that is just some of the things we saw at the Museum of Tolerance, a very inspirational

The readings from these past weeks on on issues of race and cultural patrimony were too informative considering the Native American exhibits I have attended, my work in an anthropology museum, and anthropology classes I have taken. Somehow, Cooper’s “The Long Road to Repatriation” provided more context and weight to the historical atrocities against Native Americans than any of my other educational experiences. To be fair, I am not a scholar of Native history, but I am certainly not uninformed, and it should not take a scholar or be a native person to understand these issues. As Lonetree mentioned, the Holocaust Museum presents a difficult subject and forces the visitor to “confront inhumanity” (106). I think the impact of this information as an educational experience in a museum would have a huge impact on current social and political tensions.

You might be wondering, Who created the museum? The Holocaust was all started by none other than Adolf Hitler. He got the idea that all jews were the problem to society. Then eventually it lead to more than the jews getting killed.

The Holocaust Memorial Center Zekelman Family Campus is about the horrendous events such as hate crimes that were happening during World War II. The definition of Holocaust from the museum website perspective is “The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews and five million other persons by the Nazi regime and its collaborators” (Holocaust and Survivor Defined.). “The term Holocaust comes from the Greek words of “holos” (whole) and “kaustos” (burn) which was used to describe a sacrificial offering burned on an alter” (History.com). The museum has been around for more than 25 years, in Farmington Hills and has been acknowledged by the Wall Street Journal. The museum does not only reflect on the evil, but also the strength and the courage of the victims affected in this genocide. The purpose of the Holocaust museum is to remember those who have passed away and survived, as well as, to teach and inform others about the events. There were many exhibits to choose from such as, the Jewish heritage, the descent into Nazism and the postwar period. The exhibit I will be focusing on is called, The Camp System.

Although I already knew of man’s inhumanity to man, the tour of the Museum of Tolerance opened my eyes in a new sense. All the questions I had come up with were answered, and I learned of many other incidents were the human race made mistakes. I learned that the Jews were the only group singled out for total organized annihilation by the Nazis. Every single Jew was to be killed according to the Nazis' plan. Nazi soldiers raided the Jews homes and and took them to camps where they were forced to work or be gassed. The whole family was taken, but only those capable of working long and hard were spared. The explanation of the Nazis' hatred of the Jew rests on their distorted world view that all of history was a racial struggle. They considered the Jews a race whose goal was world domination and who were a threat to Aryan dominance. They believed that all of history was a fight between races which should end in the triumph of the superior Aryan race. In their eyes, the Jews' racial origin made them criminals

The Museum of Tolerance really highlighted the personal responsibilities individuals in history had, and the ones that we might face in today’s society. In history, specifically during the Holocaust, we had the choice to help those in need. We still have that choice today, but the Holocaust really taught us how important making the choice to help was. Many people argue that if there were less bystanders, then the effect wouldn’t have been as bad. People stood back and watched as Jews were dragged down the streets and taken away to camps.

The Holocaust is without a doubt one of the most disturbing moments in history. For many years, schools have been trying to teach students about the existence of the Holocaust with an aim of ensuring that its events do not get lost. However, the case in which the Rialto school district gave eighth-grade students an assignment to read a few articles and conclude whether the Holocaust happened or not raises serious moral questions. This was after reports appeared that some of the students were given high marks for concluding that there was no such Nazi atrocity (Yarbrough). Although the district issued an apology, sent the teachers to sensitivity training, and had the students visit the Museum of Tolerance as a way of handling the situation,

Memorialization of any sort can be a tedious process, but those regarding Holocaust remembrance were particularly challenging given the surrounding social and political controversies that ensued. This is primarily seen through the issue of representation, which consistently played a key role in the creation of both the Holocaust museum in Washington D.C., and the Dachau concentration camp memorial. While the Dachau memorial’s conception stages, the designers were contemplating which victim groups to include. For instance, the mayor of Dachau stated, “Please do not make the mistake of thinking that only heroes died in Dachau. Many inmates were…there because they illegally opposed the regime of the day….You have to remember there were many criminals and homosexuals in Dachau. Do we want a memorial to such people?” (Harold Maruse, “Dachau,” 151). With this quote, the mayor implies that the memorial will only be dedicated to those he deems worthy of representation. Likewise, the White House officials orchestrating the American Holocaust Museum also debated a similar notion regarding the inclusion of ethic victim groups other than the Jews. However, Wiesel and other Holocaust survivors believed that commemorating non-Jews was an “…obscene incursion into the boundaries of Holocaust memory by those whose country-men had persecuted survivors” (Edward T. Linenthal, Preserving Memory, 53). For this reason, and in order to avoid the generation of false memories, these groups

The Museum of Tolerance has a legitimate cause that can change the world and end discrimination by encouraging personal responsibility towards ending these vices in society. Promoting the importance of personal responsibility by showing the hatred of Nazi Germany, the civil rights movement, and the violence of current warring countries illustrates the persistence of human rights abuses over the last seven decades. The dramatization also shows the individual contributions to these atrocities and the actions of a few people that accepted the challenge to change society. On the other hand, ending the suffering of children as illustrated in the exhibit is important for protecting future generations. The Museum shows the progression of the lives

Throughout the exhibit, individuals get the message of the reasons why war had started and the outcome of winning over freedom of land or religion but they also get the message of all the horrible things that came out of war. The exhibit leaves it up to to the individual of whether they are pro or anti war. Whitmarsh also mentions the theme of how the museum presents its own country vs the other countries involved in the war. Throughout the museum as a whole, there was no sense of favoritism towards England or the United Kingdom. Every piece of the exhibit gave full details of each and every side of the war, again, giving the individuals the ability to decide who was in the wrong during the

In the main room of the museum, there was a section that talked about the Nazis and how they treated the Jews. The Nazi police did not care about the way that the Jews were treated. The most important thing to