For 11 years people have been taking a seat at The Point of View Diner without a morsel being eaten.

No food is served at the interactive exhibit at the Museum of Tolerance in the heart of Los Angeles' Pico-Robertson neighborhood, just opinions on computer screens.

Actors portray a cross-section of Americans espousing racist and bigoted comments, and "diners" can register their opinions, which are immediately tabulated and displayed.

The Point of View, patterned after a 1950s diner with its red booths and stacks of plastic glasses behind a counter, is among the more popular features of the museum operated by the Simon Wiesenthal Center. The museum has attracted more than 4 million visitors. Now New York has its own Point of View Diner.

It's one of the exhibits at the New York Tolerance Center under the aegis of the $10 million Wiesenthal Center office here, which opened this week.

Based in a two-story building on East 42nd Street down the road from the former Daily News building, the 20,000-square-foot Tolerance Center in an ex-Sam Goody store is a state-of-the art educational facility. It offers interactive displays, touch-activated computer screens, video conferencing facilities and taped comments by New Yorkers -- all dedicated to various aspects of tolerance and intolerance.

The center is located a few blocks from the headquarters of the Anti-Defamation League, which for decades has served as the country's pre-eminent anti-prejudice organization under Jewish auspices. It is the first such major Jewish institution to open here since the 7-year-old Museum of Jewish Heritage-A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in Battery Park City.

The Tolerance Center deals with a wider swath of religious and ethnic groups than the Museum of Jewish Heritage, and takes a more high-tech approach than the ADL, says director Mark Weitzman, though there are also traditional panels bearing educational and historical messages.

The institution's focus is "not just Jews," Weitzman stresses; it also touches on such issues as drunk driving and weapons of mass destruction. But a Hall of Memory featuring Holocaust survivors' testimonies is dedicated to the Jewish experience.

Weitzman said at the opening ceremony Sunday that the facility's mission is to "create a center where inequality, racism and genocide are confronted, where people ask hard questions of society and themselves, and where they are willing to push beyond simplistic answers and tired cliches."

Some 150 public figures attended the event, including City Council Speaker Gifford Miller, Israeli Consul General Alon Pinkas and Rabbi Marvin Hier, founding dean of the Wiesenthal Center.

The Tolerance Center, planned before 9-11 but made more crucial by the 2001 terrorist attacks against the United States, is patterned after the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. The New York version is smaller and has a narrower educational and training focus, Weitzman said. Later this year it will host a 10th anniversary commemoration program about genocide in Rwanda.

"It's not a museum, it's not a drop-in," Weitzman said. "It's a center for the training of tolerance."

It's an appointment-only site for police officers and corporate heads, teachers and politicians, diplomats and other interested people to learn how to fight the hatred directed at a variety of religious and ethnic groups.

"I want to bring UN staff here," Weitzman said.

"It's a totally different method" than those used by the ADL, he said. "We don't go into classrooms." The classrooms come to the center.

A similar Wiesenthal Center institution, a $150 million Center for Human Dignity-Museum of Tolerance, is set to open in Jerusalem in two years.

The New York Tolerance Center, a major expansion of the Wiesenthal Center's work and public presence here, is not in competition with the ADL, says Weitzman and the ADL's national director, Abraham Foxman.

"I hope it's very effective," Foxman said. "There's enough intolerance to go around" to keep both organizations busy.

"I hope eventually it won't be needed," Foxman added. "Hopefully both of us will go out of business in our lifetime."

"From what I have seen of the museum in Los Angeles," says Michael Miller, executive vice president of the Jewish Community Relations Council, "it has been a very effective tool for spreading the message of cooperation among ethnic and religious communities. New York, with its breadth of ethnic and religious groups, will greatly benefit from the center's programs."

For months before the opening, groups from local schools and a cross-section of civic organizations participated in the Tolerance Center's educational sessions as pilot programs.

On Monday, the first official group visited -- 32 students from the Center School, a public school in Manhattan, as part of No Name-Calling Week, a project of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network and Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing.

The fifth-, sixth- and seventh-graders spent a school day at the center listening to the taped comments about prejudice, reading statements by prominent individuals displayed on the walls, sitting at the Point of View Diner, taking part in other interactive exhibits and walking through The New York Subway Scene hall designed like a subway car.

They then sat in a brightly lit classroom for a teleconference session with students at the Museum of Tolerance in L.A.

The interracial New York group acted like a typical group of preteens, slouching and fidgeting in their chairs, giggling and shouting, interrupting each other.

The session leader, from the Education Network, raised questions about bias and stereotypes. The students thrust their hands in the air to answer.

Questions and comments appeared on a large computer screen at the front of the room, and the youngsters registered their answers on palm-sized, electronic voting devices.

One of the comments: "Most teasing I see is done in fun, not to hurt people."

The students debated the question, then they voted -- 50 percent yes, 50 percent no.

The session leader prodded them to voice their opinions, to tell their own stories about encounters with prejudice, to reflect on what they experienced at the center.

That's typical of the Tolerance Center's approach, Weitzman said. "No one's lecturing at them." No one tells visitors what is a right or wrong opinion.

"The idea," he said, "is that people will respond to what they're seeing."

For information on the New York Tolerance Center, call (212) 697-1180.