The Museum of Tolerance is located on West Pico Boulevard and is a very interesting place to visit, but not ideal for children of under 12 years old, as some of the exhibits can be very disturbing.

The museum was established in 1983 and is a part of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre. It uses multimedia technology, dioramas, interactive exhibitions and two theatres that show documentary films, to help people understand racism in the United States and around the world, with particular emphasis on the Holocaust.

This is not a museum of the Holocaust alone; it shows how racism has stretched back all through the history of mankind. It is centered on Jewish persecution over the ages, with a particularly unsettling copy of a letter written in 1919 by Adolph Hitler, in which he outlines his plans for the Jewish people long before he wrote “Mein Kampf”.

It also deals with other issues of racism towards other people across the world, including the genocides perpetuated in Rwanda, Armenia and Cambodia. There are personal histories from the survivors of these atrocities which are very moving.

Another part of the museum holds the “Finding our Families, Finding Ourselves” exhibition with the personal histories of well-known Americans. The idea of this exhibition is to spark visitor’s interest in finding out more about their own histories.

Everyone knows that feeling – when you’ve got something on the tip of your tongue and can’t remember where you heard it before. It might be a line from a TV show or something someone said on the radio. Well, before you bite off your tongue go to the Paley Centre, where you can put your mind at rest and keep your tongue whole!

This Centre is simply magic! It is a cultural institution founded in 1975 by a group of serious-minded businessmen and teachers who thought that saving works of art shouldn’t be confined to paintings, sculptures or even films, but also television and radio programs.

Of course, in the seventies Internet didn’t exist, but they were its forerunners; they stocked and catalogued over 140,000 television and radio programs, which took hundreds of hours and a lot more dedication so that History students or the simply curious, could go through the Centre’s catalogue and listen to the first “Fireside chat” given by Roosevelt in 1933, or re-live the famous “War of the World’s” radio transmission by Orson Wells that spread panic across America in 1938.

Don’t be put off by the Centre’s rather austere façade, because inside you will have access to an individual console where you can watch that episode of South Park that you missed, or you can re-live the famous Beatles interview on the Ed Sullivan Show, dating back to 1964.

The Centre also hosts seminars and discussions about the creative and cultural significance of television and radio broadcasts for professionals and the public. Don’t be fooled – these debates just might influence whether there is to be an 11th season of “American Idol” on your TV screen next year!

A great place for spending an afternoon with your children is the Zimmer Children’s Museum on Wilshire Boulevard.

The museum was created to promote the ideas of citizenship and making a better society by learning respect for others in hands-on workshops. The museum also hosts family festivals and theatre performances.

On the ground floor you will find the Mann Theatre where children make-up their own plays, which are filmed and run on the museum’s internal television channel. The kids will find everything here to fire their imaginations: make-up, props and plenty of costumes. In another section is the Discovery Aeroplane - a real plane with navigation instruments, an electronic control panel and a flight simulator that will take you anywhere on the planet!

If you want to keep your feet on the ground, why not play on the Giant Tzedakah Pinball? Tzedakah in Hebrew means “charity” and you can use your Tzedakah tokens to play just like an ordinary pinball machine. The pinball is so huge that it is on two levels! In the Rhythms of the World section children can either listen to music or create their own, using the many instruments that come from all over the world.

On the lower level you will find the Wishing Wall, which is a replica of Jerusalem’s Western Wall. All you have to do is to write your wish on a slip of paper, then fold it and slip it between the bricks. You’ll also find the rest of the Tzedakah Pinball here. If your kids want to splash about while playing with plastic boats, then stop for a while by the Waterways.

Everyone wants to be a hero! In the S. Mark Taper Foundation Aid and Rescue Centre the children can learn about saving lives and ride in the fire truck, ambulance or sit in the Harbour Rescue Boat, one of the boats used after the Katrina disaster.

The museum doesn’t have a restaurant, but if you bring a picnic you can enjoy it in the museum’s community park, which has a picnic area, green lawns and a giant magnetic Safari Wall, featuring giraffe’s, elephants and other wild animals.

You will find the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, or LAMOTH, in The Grove. It is the oldest museum of this kind in the United States. It is an eye-opening and heart-catching experience and isn’t recommended for children under the age of 12.

The idea for the museum began in 1961 at the Hollywood High School, where students who had survived the Holocaust got together and decided they needed a place to keep the various artefacts they had carried out of that hell. They also wanted to express the horror and inhumanity of the era so that future generations would never forget and never repeat the monstrosity.

In 2010 a new building was designed by Hagy Belzberg on Pan Pacific Park. It has one of the largest green roofs in California and nine exhibition rooms that use lighting in an innovative way: from room to room the lighting grows dimmer as you approach the darkest pages ever to be written in the History of mankind. The original artefacts, donated by survivors from all over the world, are arranged in such a way that they tell their own mute story. There are also interactive video and audio exhibitions and you will find printed guides that give details of the people whose histories you will find throughout the museum.

In The Memory Pool in the World That Was section you will learn about Jewish life in Europe before the Second World War. Wall displays give a picture history of the Rise of Nazism between 1933 and 1938. In the World Response/Resistance/Rescue section you will find stories and photos of the brave people who helped to hide and to save their Jewish friends and neighbours.

18 displays in the Deportation and Extermination and Labour/Concentration/Death Camps sections depict the horror and harshness of the Nazi-created “final solution”; the monitors showing footage taken from the era are particularly difficult to watch. You will also find exhibits from the persecution of Catholics, homosexuals and other unfortunates who didn’t fit in with Nazi Idealism.

There are also scale models, one of Hartheim Castle where the mentally ill and handicapped were imprisoned and used in horrendous medical experiences. The model of the Sobibor Death Camp is accompanied by a video where one of the survivors explains how the camp worked and how its inmates finally rebelled and were saved.

If you are a student or a fan of architecture, you will love the Architecture and Design Museum on Wilshire Boulevard.

This is the only museum in Los Angeles dedicated to architecture and design exhibitions and it was created to fire the interest of the population in how their city was and how it could be in the future. Every housing, residential and commercial project from the past, the present and the future is represented here.

The exhibitions and educational programmes use short films, 3D models and interactive displays to make the whole visit an interesting one. One of the best parts is the Rethink Los Angeles section, where many architects have given their ideas of how the city should look in the long-distant future.
Some of the ideas could have come out of science fiction films such as the 5th Element or Blade Runner, but a lot of them have fallen back on an ecological point of view, with vast green spaces, waterways and environment-friendly means of transport.

Another display of interest is the photos of Los Angeles over the years from the late 19th century to the present day. You can see how the city grew to become the largest and most populated city in California.

When you think you’ve visited all the museums on Wilshire Boulevard, make sure that you haven’t missed the small Craft and Folk Art Museum.

This museum started out as “The Egg and the Eye” Café in 1965, serving over 50 different types of omelettes and selling international folk-art. The café closed down and was transformed into a hands-on museum in 1973, with workshops run by artists and educative programmes.

It’s really a great place to spend an hour or two, where you can learn how to make pot-pourri bowls out of almost anything that can be recycled: plastic bottles, newspapers, cardboard, etc. The museum displays crafts such as woodcarving, papier-mâché, metal work, religious artefacts, clothing, basketwork and weaving. The items are local or international, traditional or contemporary.

The best part of the museum is the gift shop. If you are looking for an original present or a souvenir for yourself, you’ll be sure to find one here! The shop is full of handmade crafts including hand-woven clothes, jewellery, toys and musical instruments such as tambourines, tam-tams, Kudu horns (the fore-runner of the vuvuzela) and beautifully decorated Rainsticks. There are also books about folk-art and educational books for children with step-by-step pictures showing them how to make small baskets, knit a scarf, and make paper-Mache objects and many other interesting items.

One Archives Gallery and Museum focuses on the history of gays and lesbians in Los Angeles. The museum showcases this history through various records of citizens, social and cultural organizations. Its collections include manuscripts, graphics, photographs and some other significant sources of information.