The new millennial urge of American Jews to merge with their past has been recognized not only by Jewish religious institutions. This secular ba'al teshuvah movement is also finding expression on screen and stage, in recordings and memoir, even in painting and conceptual art.

To a notable degree this expression is being generated by Jewish women. Two works " one an ongoing art installation by Hana Iverson called "A View From the Balcony" (shades of Arthur Miller) at the Eldridge Street Synagogue, and the other a recently closed one-woman show called "Looking for Louie" (shades of Clifford Odets), written and performed by Stacie Chaiken" illustrate the underlying issues and, to some degree, the creative challenge of the secular returnees.

    Both works were motivated by a need to connect with the life of a great-great-grandparent who came from the other side to the Lower East Side; both invoke the metaphor of stitching and both strike a poignant note, albeit in very different voices.

    The environment of Ms. Chaiken's performance "a basement space with a stamped-tin ceiling" lent contextual depth to the subject matter. But Ms. Chaiken's work was not site-specific: It was all over the map, befitting someone who, as she told the audience, "attended 14 schools before college, was engaged three times, had 67 boyfriends and hair-color changes" oy!" And who was baptized in order to marry a Catholic-convert husband whom she left because she wouldn't have been able to raise her children as Jews.

    A very attractive performer, ... Ms. Chaiken also attempted to rewrite her family history through herself, employing the stitch of forgiveness. Growing up in Covina, Calif., as the "alien child of alien parents, always in flight" "chaiken," she explained, means "bird'' in Russian" she felt emotionally and culturally cut off from her inheritance, which brought her to her own private Idaho: the Norfolk Street address of her ancestors. Attention must be paid.... If "woman is the door that reconciles us with the world," as Octavio Paz has written, Jewish men might attempt at least to  visit with Jewish women's discomfort" even if out of self interest. Or as Ms. Chaiken said, "This may all sound like self help, but we're talking Talmud."

 

Mr. Mieses is a commentator for National Public Radio and WNYC-FM.