As Isabel Wollaston notes in her paper Negotiating the marketplace: The role(s) of Holocaust museums today, "In analyzing a Holocaust museum, we need to ask who the intended audience is, to whom a museum's staff is formally accountable, and what conditions, if any, are attached to its primary sources of funding" (Wollaston 64). This certainly proves true for Houston's Holocaust museum and it reflects in the types of discourses produced by the exhibit. As noted earlier, the museum's curators seem to go out of their way to ensure the visitor knows that the exhibit is concerned with all victims of the Nazis and not only the Jews. This is evidenced throughout the exhibit in pictures and description as well as directly stated on the "Houston Survivors" tablet at the end of the exhibit. Perhaps they emphasize this point more than the other Holocaust museums do due to the source of most funding being from the local Jewish community and their desire to make everyone feel welcome, regardless of background.
This particular museum also seems more patriotic, in terms of the United States, than other museums and particularly the one in DC. They seem to put heavy emphasis on American liberators and seem to forget about America's lack of early action. Perhaps this results from the Houston museum being privately funded rather than nationally funded. A national museum would certainly have to be more self conscious of their depiction of nationalism, especially in light of the subject matter. Again along the same lines, when compared to other Holocaust museums, the Houston museum speaks little to the lack of action by foreign countries and the Catholic Church's support of the Nazi party. It seems again that this results from the Jewish source of funding for the museum and reluctance to alienate non-Jews.
As Wollaston notes farther on in her paper,
Museums communicate their own particular interpretation of the Holocaust via permanent exhibitions, as well as though publications and programmes of educational activities. Is the intended audience primarily survivors or non-survivors, Jews or non-Jews, children or adults? Whose story should take centre stage, that of the perpetrators or the victims? What of bystanders? Can these perspectives be combined? How a museum answers such questions reflects what it hopes to achieve (67).
After analyzing the Holocaust Museum Houston's permanent exhibit, it seems clear that their goal was to create discourses centered around tolerance, education, memorial, nationalism, local community, and most importantly, individual responsibility to be aware and ready to act against intolerance of any kind. Such discourses are communicated to the visitor in a full, experiential manor of multiple visualities. Alone, any one of the visual technologies used in the museum would be unable to communicate such an experience. It is through the combination of building structure and appearance, actual artifacts, written text, video evidence, personal testimonial, and images taken by victims, perpetrators, as well as liberators, that the museum is able to create such a strong truth claim the defies non-belief as well as breed an all-encompassing feeling of experience and understanding in the museum's visitors.
As Omer Bartov states concluding his essay, "[We] will no longer be able to rely on the personal memories of those who were there. Everyone, whether scholars or the lay public, gentiles or Jews, the offspring of the victims or the descendants of the killers, will be able to "experience" the event only vicariously, through documents or memoirs, photographs or material remains, films or exhibitions" (Bartov 86). It is for this reason that creating such an "experiential" museum based in multiple truth claims is so important for future generations.