Protesters urge Museum of Tolerance to address Gaza after unanswered letters

Protesters gathered outside the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles on Sunday afternoon to demand the museum add exhibits and lessons on the treatment of Palestinians. They came after the museum’s parent organization did not respond to two letters requesting a meeting.

Josh Kamensky, who handled press for the committee, told Urgent Matter in an email that passersby gave the protest “more supportive honks than angry reactions.” He said that as protesters were packing up, “a small group of aggressive, noisy counterprotestors arrived.”

The No Tolerance for Genocide Committee organized the protest outside the museum on West Pico Boulevard. The museum is the educational arm of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights organization that opened it in 1993.

The museum’s website said it aims to challenge visitors to “confront bigotry, antisemitism, and hate” and encourage “a deeper understanding of the Holocaust.”

“Never again means never again for anyone,” Rick Chertoff, a committee spokesperson, said in an emailed news release.

“Cultural institutions like the Museum of Tolerance help define how the world sees human rights, and their silence on the genocide in Gaza and the ongoing dispossession of Palestine is a signal to authoritarians in Israel, the United States and everywhere that human rights can be negotiated away.”

The committee first wrote to the Wiesenthal Center’s board on July 22. It sent the letter again August 17, saying it had not heard back.

The August letter was addressed to CEO Jim Berk; Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the center’s associate dean and global social action director; board chair Dawn Aaron; co-chair Aaron Marzwell; and secretary Richard Schwartz. It asked for a meeting within two to three weeks.

The committee said in its release that the board has not responded.

The letter describes the committee as “a group of Angelinos from various backgrounds, many of us Jewish, who believe that Never Again applies to everyone.”

It asks the museum to “acknowledge that ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people is occurring” and to document it “with appropriate exhibits, educational materials, and programming.”

The committee wrote that the museum has taken up injustices in Armenia, Cambodia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Sudan, Darfur and the United States.

“However, there has been silence in reference to Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people, which ignores the historical record,” the letter said.

Photos the committee provided to Urgent Matter showed dozens of people on the Pico Boulevard sidewalk, some in yellow safety vests. They stood behind a banner reading “No Tolerance for Genocide” and “Never Again Means Never Again for Anyone.” Hand-lettered signs read “Mu. of Tolerance Tolerates Genocide in Gaza” and “Stop Israeli Genocide in Gaza.”

One woman held up a poster of a smiling girl framed by flowers and pomegranates, captioned “Hind Rajab 2018-2024.” Hind Rajab was a 5-year-old Palestinian girl killed by Israeli forces in Gaza in January 2024 after an emergency call where she pleaded for help while trapped in a car with the bodies of her relatives. She has become a symbol of the war's civilian toll.

Actor David Clennon read a statement from Ramzy Baroud, a Palestinian-American author and journalist, at the protest.

“How can a museum, an entity of any kind, or even an individual speak of tolerance and human dignity when it places among its top priorities ‘defending the State of Israel’ and its racist ideology, Zionism?” Baroud wrote.

The Wiesenthal Center’s website lists “Defending the State of Israel” among its mission areas. A donation appeal on the site says gifts advance its “mission to combat antisemitism, defend Israel, and promote tolerance.”

Baroud also accused the center of using “the same old, tired trick of smearing Israel’s critics as antisemitic.”

“The state of California continues to support this museum under the banners of education and fighting prejudice,” Baroud wrote. “This cannot go unchallenged. This money is ours. We are the taxpayers footing the bill so that an ideologically oriented museum can tell us whose lives are worthy of mourning and whose are not.”

“Their claim to address universal examples of intolerance ignores Palestine. Could you imagine a museum about voting rights that ignored women’s fight for the vote, or racist murders to suppress Black voting rights?” said Mark Kleiman, an attorney at Kleiman/Rajaram.

“This is publicly funded hypocrisy. In the last five years they’ve gotten $30 million from the State of California. Why pay so much money to a museum that conceals the truth?”

The committee said Kleiman represents student protesters who were attacked by a mob at UCLA in 2024.

A March 2025 agenda from a California Senate budget subcommittee lists the state’s one-time grants to the museum. They were $10 million in 2021-22 to build a new antisemitism exhibit, $5 million in 2022-23 for repairs and a mobile learning bus, $2.1 million in 2023-24 to renovate its training center and $2 million in 2024-25 for more work on that center.

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s 2025-26 budget proposed another $10 million. Of that, $6.3 million would carry themes from the antisemitism exhibit into the rest of the museum. An Assembly budget subcommittee approved the item as proposed.

The same Senate document shows the state also gives the Los Angeles County Office of Education $3 million a year for anti-bias training for educators, run by the museum.

“I used to think of the Museum of Tolerance as an almost sacred space where we could reflect on human suffering and where we could see how people have recovered their dignity after being despised and persecuted,” Clennon said.

“Then I realized that the Museum had no space for the recognition of the humanity of the people of Palestine. Now I think of that building as the Museum of Ethnic Erasure.”

A United Nations commission of inquiry concluded in September 2025 that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. Human Rights Watch found in December 2024 that Israel committed acts of genocide by depriving Palestinians in Gaza of water. The Israeli rights group B’Tselem reached a genocide finding in a July 2025 report.

Israel’s government has rejected the genocide accusations.

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