Back in September I introduced in Sydney Saree Makdisi who spoke extensively about Simon Wiesenthal Centre’s Museum of Tolerance in Israel.
After years of protests and an unsuccessful legal challenge, architect Frank Gehry has pulled out of a project to build a Jerusalem counterpart to the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance that is slated to stand on a site that was once part of an ancient Muslim cemetery.
“We are no longer involved in it,” said Craig Webb, the design partner in charge of the project for the firm of Gehry Partners. He said the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which opened its original Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles in 1993, no longer had the right to use Gehry’s design and was considering alternatives. The center’s website currently reads “please check back soon” under a page devoted to the Jerusalem initiative. As the blogger Philip Weiss noted last week, all references to Gehry and images of the $250 million project have been removed from the site.