RUTHFULLY YOURS

LOS ANGELES — Before you are submerged within the museum’s theatrically darkened central galleries, before you learn how the cafes and intellectual life of the Weimar Republic gradually gave way to the annihilationist racial fantasies Hitler outlined in “Mein Kampf” — before, that is, you experience a variation of the Holocaust narrative with its wrenching genocidal climax — there are other trials a visitor to the Museum of Tolerance here must pass through.

You must first choose a door. One is invitingly labeled “Unprejudiced”; the other, illuminated in red, screams “Prejudiced.” No contest. But one door doesn’t open; the other does. Here, evidently, we must admit we are all prejudiced, not just the guards at Auschwitz.

As proof, below a streaming news ticker (“Gay Basher Gets 12 Years”) are panels about “Confronting Hate in America”: Two Latinos are beaten on Long Island; a white supremacist shoots Jews in Los Angeles; a Sikh is murdered in a post-9/11 “hate crime”; a homosexual student is brutally murdered in Wyoming. On one panel is a description of the Oklahoma City bombing; on another, the attacks of 9/11.

Walk a little farther and you come to a mock 1950s-style diner, where a television monitor broadcasts a staged news video about a drunken driver injuring his date on prom night. We are asked to record our votes about who is most responsible: the liquor store owner who illegally sold the booze, the parents of the drunk driver, the teenager himself?

A case of cyber-bullying also solicits our careful assessments. “Think,” we are urged by the signs: “Assume responsibility,” “Ask questions,” “Speak up.”

Similar prescriptions are implied throughout this 80,000-square-foot museum, which opened in 1993 as “the educational arm of the Simon Wiesenthal Center,” the international organization associated with that famed Holocaust survivor and “Nazi hunter” who died in 2005. The museum’s central exhibition about the Holocaust and the murder of six million Jews is preceded by this “Tolerancenter,” as it is called, which strains to tie together slavery, genocides, prejudice, discrimination and hate crimes, while showing even elementary school students (as the museum literature says) “the connection between these large-scale events and the epidemic of bullying in today’s schools.”

But as the annual Holocaust Remembrance Day is commemorated on Sunday — known in Hebrew as Yom HaShoah — it is worth taking a closer look at this approach to mass murder. The Museum of Tolerance is not alone. Even a modest museum devoted to the Holocaust, like the one that opened in 2009 at Queensborough Community College, offers testimonials by students about how the Holocaust has taught them about tolerance and the evils of discrimination. And no Holocaust museum, it seems, can be complete without invoking other 20th-century genocides in Rwanda, Darfur or Cambodia as proof that the lessons of the Holocaust must be taught even more fervently. In the recently opened Holocaust museum in Skokie, Ill., bullying also plays a cautionary role.

Several years ago, too, the Anne Frank Haus in Amsterdam ended its sober tour through the famed annex where that young diarist and her family hid from the Nazis with a video-laden hortatory show about nearly every social injustice that could be enumerated. The passion may now be cooler, but the impulse remains. We learn from the Amsterdam museum’s Web site that an Anne Frank School — like those being established all over the world — “obliges itself to stand up for freedom, justice, tolerance and human dignity and to resolutely turn against any form of aggression, discrimination, racism, political extremism and excessive nationalism.”

Though Yad Vashem in Israel and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington have remained relatively immune to such sweeping moralizing, in most institutions and curriculums, the Holocaust’s lessons are clear: We should all get along, become politically active and be very considerate of our neighbors. If not, well, the differences between hate crimes and the Holocaust — between bullying and Buchenwald — are just a matter of degree.

Perhaps, though, we should take the lesson even further. What if this were the approach of every historical museum? The Imperial War Museum in London might look at World War I as a result of intolerance and hold out the promise of ending all wars if only its lessons were properly learned; after all, didn’t the French and Germans enjoy a sociable Christmas holiday cease-fire in the trenches of the Western Front?

The history of American slavery might explore the many ways people have enslaved others or forced them to do things against their will. An examination of the Soviet Gulag might emphasize the need to permit greater diversity of opinion in society, or more adventurously, it might attack the notion of imprisonment itself for being so Gulag-like.

As history, this is laughable. Yet we seem willing to accept that in the case of the Holocaust, an exhibition must allude to all forms of genocide, and must offer broad lessons about tolerance.

In part, this is because of the ways many of these museums began, spurred into creation by survivors who were horrified by their own experience, unable to make sense of it or of the hatred behind it. Couldn’t it all have been prevented had others been more tolerant?

That approach is reflected in the Museum of Tolerance, whose founder, Rabbi Marvin Hier, understood Wiesenthal’s own desire to generalize the Holocaust to bring more attention to it. As Tom Segev suggests in his new biography, “Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends” (Doubleday), the museum was even conceived of as a West Coast rival to the more sober Holocaust museum then being built in Washington.

The spirit of generalization has also been applied to the nature of the Holocaust itself. In a 2005 lecture on “The Use and Abuse of Holocaust Memory,” Walter Reich, a former director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, points out that in 1979, after a commission headed by Elie Wiesel was established to create a Holocaust museum in Washington, President Jimmy Carter referred to “11 million innocent victims exterminated — 6 million of them Jews.” The 11 million figure has since become an international touchstone. In some cases it has expanded to 12, in effect diminishing Jewish centrality.

But, as Mr. Reich points out, the 11 million figure was pulled out of thin air by Wiesenthal. The historian Yehuda Bauer wrote: “Wiesenthal, as he admitted to me in private, invented the figure in order to create sympathy for the Jews — in order to make the non-Jews feel like they are part of us.” In fact, historians suggest that there were perhaps a half million non-Jews who died in concentration camps.

The impulse to tell the Holocaust story only in the context of elaborate generalizations has also helped justify its inclusion in school curriculums and helped obtain public financing for museums: The goal was not particular but general, not Judeocentric but humanitarian. The Museum of Tolerance, for example, runs an extensive series of education programs, including “Tools for Tolerance for Professionals Programs”: sensitivity training for educators, law enforcement officers and corporate leaders.

But what kind of history emerges as a result of these generalizations? History stripped of distinctions. To understand the Armenian genocide, for example, it is insufficient to treat it simply in passing, as if it resembled what happened to the Jews in Europe. Understanding it would mean examining the Ottoman Empire in the early decades of the 20th century, chronicling the relationship between Muslims and Christians on the borders of Europe, comprehending connections between the fates of Greeks and Armenians, and analyzing the imminent dissolution of that empire.

And the deeper one looks at the Holocaust itself, the more unusual its historical circumstances become. The cause of these mass killings was not “intolerance,” but something else, still scarcely understood. Making sense of the Holocaust would mean first comprehending the nature of hatred for Jews, surveying the place of Jews in European societies and dissecting the blindness of many Germans and most Europeans to the ambitions Hitler made so explicit.

These killings were not in the context of war over contested terrain; they often took precedence over the very waging of war. And they were accomplished not primarily through individual murders by sword or rifle, as so many other ethnic massacres before and since have been, but rather by harnessing the machinery of the era’s most advanced industrial society.

Intolerance is almost too easy an explanation, implying a comforting moral message. Instead, why not look at how Hitler’s powers might have been undercut before he began to wage the war in Europe and the war against the Jews? Wouldn’t an examination of those possibilities offer a more profound lesson about how to prevent genocide?

And how central is intolerance to genocide anyway? Many intolerant societies don’t set up bureaucratic offices to supervise efficient mass murder. Many people who consider themselves very tolerant are nonetheless blind to their own hatreds. There are even intolerant people who would still find genocide unthinkable.

Finally, the homiletic approach to the Holocaust has broken down almost all inhibitions in using the Holocaust as an analogy, even though the eagerness to do so is a sure sign of misuse. And judging from recent history, the analogies that have already been established, far from making genocide unthinkable, have helped make it seem as commonplace a possibility as schoolyard bullying.