Exhibit Asks: Who’s to Blame?

A news flash breaks on the TV in a crowded diner. Familiar images flicker across the screen: Yellow police tape cordoning off a smashed car. A shellshocked mother staring wildly at the scene, trying to absorb the news.

Her teenage son, driving home drunk after the prom, has crashed into another car and been killed. “Every parent’s worst nightmare,” the television anchor solemnly intones.

But this isn’t the nightly news. It’s the latest interactive exhibit at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a high-tech experience that thrusts visitors into a crisis and asks them to ponder the boundaries of personal responsibility.

With a click of a button, the audience can interview the girlfriend who bought alcohol for the teenager with her fake ID and the liquor store clerk who sold it to her. With another click, their vote can determine who shares responsibility in the tragedy, and they can instantly see the tabulated opinions of everyone in the diner.

After asking visitors to confront the horrors of the Holocaust and modern-day intolerance, the 5-year-old Los Angeles museum is now posing a new question: Who takes responsibility in our society?

“We want people to feel empowered by this,” said Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the center. “It’s integrated into our approach to the Holocaust. The museum asks: Why did the Holocaust occur? It was because too many people sat in the bleachers and did nothing. The world is not an easy one, and a responsible citizen is not a bystander. The idea is to be part of the process, part of the community, as complex as it is.”

The Point of View Diner, which opened this month after two years of planning, is a $1.4-million exhibit set in a 1950s-style diner complete with red vinyl booths, stacks of coffee mugs and silver jukeboxes that house individual video screens.

“We wanted to use a place where we felt the omnipresent media is there, but people tend to dismiss it and put it in the background,” said Richard Houghton, creative director of 3D Concepts, a London-based museum design company. “The diner was a good starting point.”

Hier added: “It’s a piece of Americana, a place where people come to talk about their world.”

A group of somber students filled the diner on a recent afternoon, studiously watching the urgent television reports. Arami Kim, 15, pushed a button on her video monitor to listen to how the dead teenager’s girlfriend felt.

“I loved Charlie, but it’s not my fault,” says the girl on the screen. “Everyone drinks. Give me a break--I didn’t make him drink it.”

The clerk who sold her the liquor has a similar response. “The problem isn’t me,” he says. “Don’t you think the responsibility lies with the kid who got drunk?”

Many students appeared shaken after this intimate look at the individual decisions that led to a fatal drunk driving incident.

“I felt like crying in parts of it,” said Kim, a 10th-grader at Peninsula High School in Palos Verdes. “It makes it so personal. It shows what happens when you don’t think about what you do, and how you can affect others.”

The exhibit is also an attempt to push people to see the role of their personal responsibility in larger social issues.

At the end of the television report, images of the homeless, war victims in Bosnia and Nazi officers parade across the screen.

“If we all assume responsibility when we witness evil, we can change the world,” the narrator says. The camera then turns on the audience, and their faces flash on the television monitors.

For some visitors, the message was clear.

“It shows what happens when you’re irresponsible,” said Krysta Ross, 14, an eighth-grader at Central Middle School in Riverside. “I think it was saying that it is not just one person who can be responsible. You can really change things yourself.”

The technology in the exhibit reflects the kind of interactive experience that Hier said he hopes to keep adding.

Two different scenarios currently play in the diner, but designers plan to create more to keep the exhibit current. And within the year, another multimedia experience called “Crime and Punishment” will be installed, Hier said. In this mock courtroom, visitors will be able to serve on juries that examine global crimes such as starvation and genocide.

“We have to recognize our world has changed,” Hier said. “A museum has to keep up with the times. With this technology, we get students’ attention. If you get their attention, you get their input and you get them thinking.”