[12] In its 2013 survey of Jewish charity compensation, the Jewish-American magazine The Forward singled out Hier as "by far the most overpaid CEO" earning double the amount of what would be expected.

In 1977, he moved to Los Angeles and bought a building on Pico Boulevard using a $500,000 donation from Samuel Belzberg which was matched with another half a million from Toronto-based real estate maven Joseph Tannenbaum.

Edward Norden, writing for Commentary, dismissed the museum as "a low-tech affair fashioned by and for Jews and holding nothing against the Gentiles back—an outsized portrait of Pius XII was given a prominent place among pictures of those who 'didn't care.'

"[5] Hier, a skillful fundraiser, networked with the Hollywood célébrité, local politicians, and businessmen and raised large sums of money which he used to expand his operations.

This bid was vociferously opposed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Anti-Defamation League and secular Jewish organizations due to the unclear separation between the yeshiva and the center.

[16][20] This drew the ire of some parts of Los Angeles Jewish community because of the precarious situation for Jews in Turkey, which doesn't recognize the Armenian genocide.

[25] The same year, Sheldon Teitelbaum and Tom Waldman profiled Hier in the Los Angeles Times, describing him as the "unorthodox rabbi", and characterized his success as follows:[16] Yet he has apparently become something of a folk-hero among the city's 700,000 Jews; the center is perpetually deluged by $10 donations from even the most non-observant.

The names were the first results of Operation Last Chance, a drive launched that year by the center to track down former Nazis for World War II-era crimes before they die of old age.

According to the center, about 2,000 Nazi war criminals entered Canada illegally by providing false documents, but the Canadian government largely ignored their presence until the mid-1980s.

The center's 2021 edition of its "Global Anti-Semitism Top Ten" list included in seventh place the entire country of Germany, particularly Michael Blume [de], the commissioner against antisemitism of the German state of Baden-Württemberg, alleging that he had liked a 2019 Facebook post equating Zionism with Nazism.

The European Union's coordinator for combatting antisemitism, Katharina von Schnurbein, said that by including Blume on its list, the center "discredit[s] the invaluable legacy of Simon Wiesenthal".

[49] In January 2023 the Managing editor of the biggest Jewish Newspaper in Germany, jüdische Allgemeine, criticised the Wiesenthal Center for integrating Christoph Heusgen, Jakob Augstein and Michael Blume in its lists and for naming them next to terrorists and anti-Semites.

In his reply to Hier's letter three weeks later, Kohl expressed his disappointment "at how little many opponents of German unity take note of the fact that for decades now especially the young generation in the free part of Germany has been informed without any taboos of the causes and consequences of the National Socialist tyranny: in schools, universities, church or other educational institutions and the media.

"[67][68][69] Later, in the early stages of the First Gulf War, the center released a report which accused Western companies of complicity in Iraq's chemical weapons program.

German companies had sold Zyklon-B to Iraq and they also helped it build gas chambers - modeled on those which were used by the Nazis - to exterminate Iranian prisoners of war, according to the report.

"[75] In 2017, Hier faced harsh criticism from the Jewish-American community for accepting an invitation by the Trump campaign to hold a prayer at the president elect's inauguration.

That didn't placate his critics who claimed that Trump was a different kind of president who targeted minorities and had at times used tropes considered by many to be antisemitic.

[76] Criticism came from Peter Beinart writing in The Forward that "they will reserve a special mention for the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Rabbi Marvin Hier.

[83] The report claimed that BDS is a "thinly-disguised effort to coordinate and complement the violent strategy of Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim 'rejectionists' who have refused to make peace with Israel for over six decades, and to pursue a high-profile campaign composed of anti-Israel big lies to help destroy the Jewish State by any and all means".

[85][better source needed] In its filing of the suit, the CBSP labelled the accusations "ridiculous", stating that its charitable work consisted of providing aid to some 3,000 Palestinian orphans.

The court ruled that documents produced by the Wiesenthal Center established no "direct or indirect participation in financing terrorism" on the part of the CBSP, and that the allegations were "seriously defamatory".

On May 18, 2006, one day before Kelly's story was to be published, the center wrote a letter to United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan urging the international community to pressure Iran to drop the measure.

[91] In the letter he alleged that the founders of the museum, John and Gertrude Hunt, had close ties to the head of the Nazi Party (NSDP-AO) in Ireland, among others, and that the British had suspected the couple of espionage during the Second world war.

The Jewish Week noted that the center itself was accused of intolerance when it built a museum in Jerusalem on land that was once a Muslim cemetery, after gaining approval from Israeli courts.

The band wore military-inspired uniforms, adorned with the German medal Iron Cross and Nazi insignia such as the death skull and SS eagle on MTV Japan's primetime program "Mega Vector".

Cooper said in a written protest to the band's management company Sony Music Artists, MTV Japan and the Japanese entertainment group Avex (Kishidan's label at the time being and also the current one) that "there is no excuse for such an outrage" and that "many young Japanese are "woefully uneducated" about the crimes against humanity committed by Nazi Germany and Japan during the second world war, but global entities like MTV and Sony Music should know better".

On November 11, 2018, Cooper denounced the South Korean band BTS with the following statement: "Flags appearing on stage at their concert were eerily similar to the Nazi Swastika.

"[16] Wendy Brown in her 2009 dissertation criticized the use of tolerance[5] for what she identified as a "Zionist political agenda of the Wiesenthal Center", and the museum, for offering a one-sided view of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

It includes public hate-mongering of Muslims, regular appeals to a neofascist form of Zionism, and relentless provocations to religious war in Israel/Palestine.In Beyond Chutzpah, Norman Finkelstein accuses the center of exaggerating and fabricating anti-Semitism for monetary gain:[109][relevant?

In the cases of Foxman and Hier this would be a real tragedy: both get paid nearly a half million dollars annually from their respective "charitable" organizations.The center is featured in the movie Freedom Writers.