The Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles is being illuminated in blue for 72 hours to remember the Oct. 7 victims and symbolize a pledge to fight Jew-hatred everywhere, Vlad Khaykin, head of North American advocacy at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, told JNS.
“This is not only a promise that the victims will not be forgotten, that their stories will not be erased,” he said. “It’s also a commitment to confront antisemitism and hate anywhere that it rears its head.”
The museum is being lit up one day each for the three years since Oct. 7, according to Khaykin.
He told JNS near the museum, which is the center’s educational arm, on Tuesday evening that blue has “always been a color of significance to the Jewish people.”
“It’s our national color, related to the blue stripes that have traditionally donned the prayer shawl, the tallit that Jews wear when they pray,” he said. (Many Jews use prayer shawls with black stripes, but a blue color articulated in the Torah has long been associated with the tallit.)
The museum was also lit up in blue for Oct. 7 in 2024 and 2025.
“We wanted to do something that would be significant, that would be seen by the entire community,” Khaykin told JNS. “Not just a commemorative event that people have to opt into, but something that people would see as they drove by, that would be a reminder of what happened and a testament to the resilience of the Jewish people and the struggles that we’ve endured.”
“Oct. 7 was a singular event,” he said. “Most Jews alive today were not alive during the Holocaust. So Oct. 7 stands as the worst day in Jewish history during our lifetimes.”
Khaykin said that there has been an “absolute explosion” of Jew-hatred in the country and worldwide.
“One of the things that is important to recognize about antisemitism in 2026 is that it is more than an organic social prejudice,” he told JNS. “It is a tool of statecraft. It is a tool of geopolitics.”
“More people have woken to that fact since Oct. 7 and everything that’s happened since,” he said.
According to Khaykin, “hostile foreign actors” have imported Jew-hatred into the United States to both demonize Jews and Israel and undermine “democracy itself.”
In prior years, everyone was “waiting with bated breath” about the fate of the hostages.
“Now, I think the community is really able to take that breath and really begin to process and digest everything that happened on Oct. 7 in 2023, and everything that’s happened since,” he told JNS.
“I think a lot of the commemorations are reflective of that communal collective processing, of the grief and trauma that we have endured and continue to endure,” he said.
‘Ebbs and flows’
Khaykin agreed with what a scholar of antisemitism told JNS in September, that it’s very unlikely antisemitism will return to pre-Oct. 7 levels in the country anytime soon.
“It’s difficult to put the genie back in the bottle,” he told JNS, since Jew-hatred “historically ebbs and flows.”
“There are periods of heightened antisemitism, and then there are periods where we take action and see some degree of waning, at least publicly, in terms of the acceptability of public expressions of antisemitism,” he said.
He cited Martin Luther King Jr.’s statement that “the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice.”
“I would say that if we want to bend the moral arc of the universe toward justice with regard to antisemitism, we’re going to have to bend it,” Khaykin told JNS. “It’s going to take the work of not only Jewish organizations, but our allies and the government itself, to really understand antisemitism at the scale, scope and the nature of what it is today.”
He thinks a “multivariated approach” is necessary to address Jew-hatred and that it must include education, policy, law enforcement and online moderation.
“Hostile actors” are “exploiting” technology platforms to spread their propaganda, he said.
“We really need to change the legal environment within which these companies are operating, so that they essentially are part of the solution rather than part of the problem,” Khaykin told JNS.
“Right now, they have a profit motive,” he said. “They don’t have a similarly strong incentive that compels them to moderate their platforms in any meaningful way.”
